Slashdot Mirror
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."
I worked with a man who was a Marine and had a couple years in the Airforce. He wasn't the "brightest" guy in the world but had a lot of military experience and could talk about it all day. He didn't like UNIX much in the service because he said their equipment didn't work well often. But with the Windows based systems, things worked a lot better and were much easier for soldiers to use. I'm not sure what this has to do with this article but I assume we should listen to these kinds of statements to see how we can make Linux based systems more reliable and easy to use for people that depend on a system they can use under extreme stress and fatigue.
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
Hmmm How long till Bill Gatesis on a plane to the Whitehouse for a closed door session with Bush?
As for your Buddy and UNIX in the AIRFORCE thats a Crock.
Never had a single problem with it or its counterpart OS400 and neither did my fellow Airmen/Sgt's
Me thinks your a M$ plant.
always open source? This is not the case as Iv seen many crypto chips which are asics that started as software implentations. These are not Open, the interfaces to the chips arnt even open.. but motorolla does sell phones with the chips in them.. course they dont sell them to us.. the sales of the hardware arnt even open. Its true that the .gov has funded open source, but not all .gov is open source.. not even close.
I've worked on two CRADAs and I don't think you should put too much hope in them.
I came in at the last part of one CRADA were we deveolped a new way of doing geologic testing. By the time the finalists had been selected we began testing, running qual/quant analysis on the data, and made improvements to increase productivity. The product was offered almost immediately for private work. That was the great promise of the CRADA; faster time to market for high frontier scientific advances.
It has been 12 years since that CRADA was completed and the technology is just now beginning to adapt to the demands that the orignal development agreement envisioned. While the time to commercialize the product outside has been slow, we did use the technology for selected drilling projects.
The second one started about when the last one ended. We are just now (10 years later) getting to the field with our other remote sensing projects. And as in the case of the drilling CRADA, the only customer at this point is the federal government.
Which brings up an interesting question: "Would the development happen faster or slower without the government involvement?" I think the getting the govenment involved just muddies the water. The only benefit to government agencies from a CRADA is the intellectual property aspects. But if you only had only one customer in the world, would you make your IP an issue, or you you just quote a price?
Know what I mean?
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
Work in the research and development area of the military and can tell you that OSS is prevelant everywhere. If you look at the venders the military is asking to build it's products you will see if you can dig deep enough linux kernals in many of the systems. Primary reason...they can use COTS hardware, a license free kernal, and then just build a proprietary app on top and viola, a robust and reliable product that's easy to write to software-wise (using C and other well documented standards), and allows a fairly good profit margin from the start if they win the contract. Unix is dying or just about dead for the license reason. Don't get me started on NMCI. Everyone, and I mean EVERYONE in the military hates it (totally inflexible to the ever changing needs we have). EDS is being investigated by the FTC, and if the military is lucky, won't get their NMCI contract renewed in 2007. Microsoft will remain the desktop of choice as long as DoD continues to bankroll DELL into continued high profits. This will also keep INTEL in the black as well due to DELLs inability to see the value in AMD and other processors. It's become too easy for our purchase agents to just hit the MS/DELL/INTEL "buy" button. Until this changes, we'll be stuck with their stuff whether we like it our not.
Does the program source become classified or does the data the program operates on become classified. If its the latter then you could even gpl and release the code. Having worked on classified data sets I can say they tend to hold that much closer then programs chomping on them. DOD was more then happy to watch people publish the code, but the images (data sets) the code worked on were held tightly.
I can definitely confirm the data/code classification split. I've worked both sides of the fence in my career. My current company (Yumetech) does almost all OSS software development. One of our primary customers is the US Navy - both the Naval Postgraduate School and the Naval Undersea Warfare Center. It's been an explicit requirement of theirs for quite a number of years now that they release as much code as possible under an open source license (typically LGPL or BSD-style). You'll find quite a number of their libraries up on SourceForge. Only one of our applications is required to be closed-source, and at that, only a small part of it dealing with some simulation algorithms (terrorism related so you can imagine why they'd be not willing to release that source).
For all the other applications, it is only the data that they care about being classified. In a lot of cases, they encourage us to seek non-naval funding for our development efforts. For example, recently, one of our apps also got some NIST and NASA funding as well.
You'll find the proprietary code, such as the big C4ISR systems etc are that way more at the insistance of the contractors developing it, rather than the military. This is so that the contractors can then repackage it and sell it to other countries or so that they government has their hands tied for getting long-term maintenance of the code.
Life is complete only for brief intervals in between toys or projects -- John Dalton