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Navy Commissions Open Source R&D
Lin_Matt writes "OSSI has announced a three year Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) with the U.S. Navy to explore and expand the usage of Open Source Software. Barry Duplantis of Red Hat will be serving as the Program Manager for this CRADA which will cover the Navy's use of OSS within the Naval Oceanographic Office's Web services, scientific computing and enterprise architecture systems."
If Free and Open Source software aquires a stronghold in the US military, what will the effect be on the more idealistic side of the Free Software movement? Richard Stallman is known to be opposed to the military industrial complex. Could we see an anti-military GPL that allows normal use except in orginizations who's express purpose is to kill people? I think many open source coders would, if they could, liscence their software in a way that would ban or restrict the right of the US war machine to use it.
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
Just a little background info first. I was stationed as Naval Air Station Meridian as the air wing's network administrator for 3-1/2 yrs starting in 2001. (I was also an instructor for the jet program.) So, my comments are from direct, personal experience.
Things have probably changed in the last year since I left, I'm sure, but a little perspective might be in order.
While I was there, I did software development for personal interest, fun, and the thrill of making something that would help everyone. No glory, no money, just because I enjoyed it. I also did some development for some Coalition projects for multinational forces, basically because they needed it and no one else had anything that was even close to being finished ("close" meaning a beta version in less than a year.) I've used a lot of different OSS, but my own personal favorites were Java or Java+Tomcat. (Go ahead and email me directly if you want to criticise those choices; I can take it.)
During my tenure, internal software development was on the run. The NMCI project (Google for "EDS" and "NMCI" and you'll find out plenty) worked to specifically kill any applications that weren't "approved." There were legitimate reasons for this, but the end result was that practically only MS and MS-compatible products were allowed...bad news for anyone who wanted to write software.
One of the reasons I left (amongst many, none bitter) was that I enjoyed working with software but knew that I would have absolutely no future in it if I stayed in. Glad to find out I was wrong.
It's a very small step, but to have it officially announced that OSS is being used for a project shows that someone, somewhere, is paying attention to the (God forgive me for using this term...personally, I hate it) changes in "paradigms" about how software is developed, used, and implemented.
I like to program; I know dozens of other military guys/gals who also like it. It's good to see that they may have a future that allows them to do some good and enjoy it.
Never confuse movement with action. --Hemingway
Sit down and read "Skunk Works" by Ben Rich. he details trying to deal with the Navy on a couple aircraft design projects while heaidng the skunk works at lockheed, and his work on the stealth ship program. The Navy will overburden you with silly, expensive, useless crap. (The stealth ship, for example, had to have a paint locker built in. A ship that would never, ever be painted again. But all navy ships had one, so by God the stealth ship needed one too...)
Bottom line (from the book anyway): the Navy is an insular community of officious, small minded, power hungry folks who value a project on two things: How many men will I command, and how much does it cost? Bigger, high budget projects obviously mean better projects.
Doing things cheaper, better, faster, and more efficiently doesn't seem to be the Navy way. I'd like to be wrong, but i seriously doubt I will be. The Navy was born to use NT 4.0.
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
EDS?
Not EDS, the contractor that trashed 60,000 MSFT
computers at Britain's Health Services earlier
this year?
Not EDS, the contractor that is nearly 2 years
behind schedule in the deployment of new MSFT
servers and desktops to the US Marine Corps?
I cannot help but wonder if these problems are
what has led up to this OSS initiative. Glad
to see that the US military is not quite as
pig-headed as the DHS (Dept. of Homeland Security)
who have spent/committed over $6 Billion USD
(multi-year contract) for MSFT's products as the
basis for their unified IT infrastructure.