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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."
So what? US Government has funded software development before and it's always been open source'd. No big deal.
Excellent. Maybe now Microsoft won't be invading every crevice of our military... Speaking of Microsoft, when does skynet come online?
Due to financial difficulties, the light at the end of the tunnel has been turned off.
The reality is, is that if open-source isn't the option then we might as well be handing everything over to one insane little geek rather then a community. Live long and prosper Linux!
Linux blog http://nsajeff.com/blog
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
Why wouldn't the entire gov't use open-source? Most cost analysis studies show that Linux is cheaper in the long run not to mention more secure. The studies that indicate Windows to be cheaper are obviously biased.
Linux blog http://nsajeff.com/blog
Microsoft has been waving the "Buy American" banner for too long. Red Hat is an American company too!
Hey, at least we'll be OSS whores. Then we'll know what's causing our apps to crash!
Due to financial difficulties, the light at the end of the tunnel has been turned off.
Now we can be Redhat's whores instead of Microsoft's whores.
I think it would have been funnier as: "Now we can be Redhat's whores instead of Redmond's whores."
Wonder how MS and the other vVendors on the NMCI (Navy Marine Corp Intranet) contract will take this.. (EDS being the main contractor...)
Yes. This means it will only be a matter of time before total world domination via *nix. /*Sarcasm*/
This news makes me happy.
"Well then, my goal becomes clear, the broccoli must die." -Stewie
NAVOCEANO is located in Bay St. Louis, MS. If you think someone from a "renowned bastion" is going to spend their days hangin' out in southern Mississippi...
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.
I think government is one of the areas where going open-source makes the most sense; I'd much rather see tax-payer money go into FOSS than Microsoft's pockets...
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!"
This would be a level of power that proprietary software hasn't even touched yet: crashing not just some puny cruiser, but a flattop... And if wireless support were thrown in, maybe FOSS could strand an entire battlegroup! The possibilities are limitless.
The important reason why the entire government should use open source is that it's taxpayer money that they're using, so it should provide as much benefit to the taxpayers as possible.
Granted, sometimes this isn't possible (e.g. national security), but it ought to be factored into the cost/benefit analysis.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
"causing a ship-wide crash that leaves the most formidable weapons system on the planet totally helpless and dead in the water."
Just like NT did with a naval destroyer a few years back.
Linux has just reached at the very least the NT level of complexity.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
More of the same, not that I've got any problem with that!
For instance, the Navy's Proteanforge is fantastic on so many levels it's not even funny. Besides being one of the few public Sourceforge deployements outside of sf.net, the code there is just wildly interesting, and has been for several years now.
Not to mention the funding the Navy put into Onion Routing Research and it's very popular implementation.
what about companies that profit from war ?
what about companies that create weapons ?
what about companies that pollute the enviroment ?
what about companies convicted of fraud ?
ethics should be a of concern to everyone, because its in short supply in the so called "developed" world, greed is the trend , fuck you and your kids and my kids , gimme my 30,000ft golden palace now !
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
Since then, I've discovered that they've been involved in multicasting, network testing suites and a whole bunch of other stuff. They've a site based on the Sourceforge software for developing such projects, called ProteanForge.
So far, so good. They're obviously into Open Source in a big way. Despite the fears of some posters, this has not caused the end of the world. Yet, anyway.
Two drawbacks, though. They may be good coders - and they are! - but they are LOUSY at keeping projects going and even worse at posting news items. The last news posting is dated November 14, 2003. Ok, sure, they might have decided to put their efforts elsewhere. That happens. So why not hand the code over to someone else? The stuff isn't classified, it's Open Source, why not keep the good stuff alive?
Make that three things. They're lousy at letting anyone know they ARE doing Open Source work. I happen to keep a close eye on groups I know are involved in Open Source, but I only found out about the newer projects relatively recently and I'm damn sure that most people don't know about them at all.
(Well, up until this post on Slashdot, anyway.)
True, nothing is "owed", but this isn't about owing. This is about establishing yourself as a credible source, thereby not only increasing the interest of coders who might be of value, but also enhancing the testing of these products, and finally establishing a rapport with a sector of the IT industry that has become wary of Government involvement.
It wasn't so long ago that IBM was the "Evil IT Baron". These days, their relationship has mellowed, their older product lines have a new lease of life, their reputation has recovered and they've even made some impressive strides into the extreme high-performance computing world.
This is where the US Navy could have been, seven or eight years ago. They were already releasing Open Source products then, and may well have been years earlier. Instead, their Open Source products are shrouded in secrecy, even though they're plastered over the Internet and GPLed/BSDed to boot! Instead of learning from their own experiences, they are pulling away.
Yes, I find that annoying. There are some damn good projects out there, that they're letting rot for no reason at all. (Like I said, even if they didn't want to maintain them, they could always hand them to someone else. As IBM did recently, for example.)
It's good that the Navy is now starting to back Open Source R&D, but I will only believe that they understand what that means when I see some real understanding from them over what they already have.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
You're damn right. Who else is better suited for open source than the guys who are involved with it more then any other entity and are largely responsible for its mainstream use today. Check the kernel changelogs, or Gnome (Red Hat also hosts their website), GCC, a ton of work for GCJ, lots of work on many of the Apache projects, and many other very important projects in OSS from the lowest level things to stuff every day users use. Red Hat contributes far more code then any one else to those plus many many more projects. Red Hat as a policy open sources everything it has and allows all patents to be used by open source projects. So far the only mistake Red Hat made was a marketing mistake and who can blame them? They are getting bigger and must learn from things like they did.
/. community at large, not necessarily just the parent.
They never once started abusing the community like many companies that just repackage many open source projects together and maybe add a little custom utility to manage some things. Red Hat is an integral part to the OSS movement so people should really stop bad mouthing them. Red Hat puts food on the table for the best of the best enginneers in OSS (excluding some which OSDL covers). Oh yea and not to mention, many of those 24 hour security responses that the OSS world is famous for come from Red Hat. I'm sick of people talking down on them on slashdot, its ridiculous the FUD some are spreading. Thank god alot of people realize that it is just FUD and nothing more.
Regards,
Steve
P.S. This post is directed at the
The aforementioned RedHat based Q70 is interfacing to a Single Board Computer running XP-Embedded
NB: the only ECDIS-N certified voyage management system runs on Windows
There is something to be said for an OS baseline that doesn't change monthly/weekly/daily.
What, like QNX?
I thought it was designed specifically for mission-critical, has-to-work, has-to-have-great-support, musn't-change-often kind of situations. I'm sure there's other OS's like it, too. Why Windows?
OT, but incidentally if anyone's wanting to make good use of older (Pentium or early PII) hardware as a dedicated MP3 Jukebox or 'net browsing box, you can do worse than QNX for x86. BeOS is a good choice, too, if you can find a copy. They both outperform every Windows version since '95 and every modern Linux/BSD on old hardware, when it comes to graphical operations, like managing a playlist, browsing the web, or watching video.
There's a surprising amount of software available for both of them, too. Plus, they're both *nix(ish)!
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.
Hey, at least we'll be OSS whores. Then we'll know what's causing our apps to crash!
Or our F-14's.
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.
I think the the photonics masts for the VIRGINIA that replace periscopes run Red Hat Linux on Apple server hardware. At least the prototype software I saw seemed to indicate this.
a navy program using open source software becomes classified?
Is that usq-70 or uyq-70???
He didn't like UNIX much in the service because he said their equipment didn't work well often.
It may be that the applications written for the UNIX boxes were the problem. Windows doesn't have a monopoly on poorly written applications. If a application uses a lot of the memory and dives into a memory hogging infinite loop, it isn't pretty, whether it is a Windows box or UNIX box.
It could possibly be the hardware itself. The military often has their computers in places that aren't the most hardware-friendly environments.
It could also be poor documentation. If the documentation is written for a comp-sci grad, assuming that obvious points that would be obvious to a comp-sci grad are known, the rifleman fresh out of high school/boot camp will probably have a few problems with getting the software to do what he wants.
The Navy uses alot of open source, check out Protean Forge, the Naval Research Lab's sourceforge server...
[o]_O
The ship in question was the USS Yorktown, and it happened in September 1997, I think.
You obviously haven't checked out their prices, nor compared then to novell's nor looked into the cost of supporting software with live people rather then just tossing a manual at them.
Regards,
Steve
Normally I just BSD shit I write, but the more I think about it, I'd just as soon the military (and probably the government in general) couldn't legally make use of my code for their own purposes.
Ah, so THAT'S how they make "Baby Oil"! (I mean, if you make "Olive Oil" by squishing Olives...)
Hey, I warned you that it was tasteless and off-topic...
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
So when do you think a fetus becomes a viable human being? Conception? When the blastocyst embeds itself in the endometrium? Maybe when it starts to develop a brain and spinal chord? Perhaps when its heart starts to beat? Maybe when it starts to beat regularly? When it is no longer called an embryo and is called a fetus? Birth? Maybe when it can walk? Perhaps feed itself and wipe its own ass? Kindergaten?
The reason I believe it is a viable human being from conception is simply the fact that you know it is going to be human, and there is no step in the development process that suggests it might be something else. No one ever carried a fetus to term and found out it was a koala bear, or a jeep.
Note to self: No more arguing with the faithful.
It's different for every birth and every fetus. Legally the cut off date is the third trimester. Sure it's arbitrary but then so is the legal age for drinking, voting etc.
evil is as evil does
Well being from Louisiana, the name Duplantis is a familiar one, Barry more so, and some quick googling confirmed my suspicions.
Barry Duplantis is from the same town as I am and was my company commander in military school. A special forces cat who went to military college(marion military) while he is the service, imagine a guy at 23 leading 40 14-16 year cadets. And pulling it off.
That being said, Barry is super intelligent and resourceful, so and knows his way around a machine, used to site in front of my apple 2 in the barracks. Plus can whip most peoples asses in under ten seconds. But heart is a great cajun man.
As for people in the military who use computers. Two of my best friends who are ex marines, and they are unix whizzes, total geeks.
Puto
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
Jarheads get a bad rap. I've known three ex-marines, and all were quite intelligent.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
ules about certification [verified levels of security and resistance to hacking] that DOD applies to systems software have been set up to favor the standard UNIX and Windows offerings. It is only within the last year that Red Had got a particular version. The hurdle is obviously NOT the quality or inherent security of the product but the enormous expense of the certification process. The money is nothing to MS but a big deal to Red Hat. IBM and Oracle, if I remember correctly, helped pay for the RH certification.
On the other hand, while fighting to get a DOD contract in the first place, many would-be contractors with limited funds do use OSS to put demo systems together to support their bid. So yes, I have shown the Air Force a huge wargame simulator ported to RH and no, they didn't buy it.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
20 Years in the Navy has taught me two important things about Unix. 1. It doesn't like to have the power shutdown on it suddenly. 2. It's a b1tch to reload all the software when this inevitably happens. Ever been on a Warship? The power has a tendency to be less than stable. UPS you say? Yeah, they work like crap on the old HP/UX machines the military likes to use. Maintenance training was "...if it breaks, call tech support." Heh, kinda hard to do when you are in the middle of a fire fight in the Persian Gulf. I hate windows, but it's more forgiving and more widely known to the average 18 year old kid that I have working for me. The Airforce guy was on the money.
NMCI is actually installing developer machines with SQL 7, IE 5.5 and several other 7 to 10 year old software packages. It's like a working sofware museum piece. The Navy has to pay for all those licenses, then pay for the licenses so their developers can upgrade to last week.
Developers can't access their email at the same time they're logged in to do development. They have to log out and log back in with a different account. There's efficiency in action. It's insane.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I could care less about what people say, or what email they send.
I don't want any software I write being used to murder people (or support the murdering of them). That's not an unrealistic condition to place on the free use of that software.
They have an article about the alarm caused by the "Windows for Warships" project in England.
Seems the history of Windows on warships in the US is not good (read the sidebar about how US warships have been taken out of action by Windows crashes) - and people do NOT want Windows on nuclear submarines - isolated from critical (read: "nuclear launch") subsystems or not.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Then why don't you say THAT, instead of "THE US MILITARY". The UN and every country around the world murdered people by remaining neutral (or supplying murders) in Kosovo, Rwanda, and countless other fucked up conflicts throughout the world. Hell, we're STILL refusing to help in the Congo. You want to talk about murder? That's millions dead.
The US Military has been, especially in the last century, really good at mainly targeting some pretty bad dictators recently. I mean unless you think we should've sat down for a mutual wank session with Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Milosevich, or Saddam. Even Ho Chi Minh was a pretty bad dude. The US Military has also been extremely good about only going places and killing people your elected politicians have sent them to... wait a minute. I forgot, they don't do what they're told by scumbag politicians. That's not what a military does these days.
Why don't you make a copy of GPL, then add in some little line like:
7. This program may not be used to further any efforts to kill any living human being without prior, written authorization from the author.
OR the anti-arbortion/pro-life version:
7. This program may not be used to further any efforts to kill any human being (born or unborn) without prior, written authorization from the author.
OR the vegan version:
7. This program may not be used to further any efforts to murder any living organism (plant or animal, born or not-yet-born), even with prior, written authorization from the author.
OOOOR the environmentally-friendly version:
7. This program may not be used in conjunction with anything else which would continue or further the destruction of the earth's natural resources. This statement expressly prohibits the use of this program in conjunction with any fossil-fuel-burning technology, or products, or the use of this program on a computer that is being powered by electricity produced from fossil fuels.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOR even more radical. We COULD just make the software free and open. And then anyone could use it... even soddomites, Saddamites, adulterers, blasphemers, lusters, gluttons, females, males, extremely intelligent chimps, somewhat-more-evolved monkeys... And YES, even politicians, murderers, and, yes, your most hated of all: the military.
Holy crap. I should write a license that'd do THAT. Then I could call it........ copylefting.
I hope you realize what makes this idea so grand, so novel. Gates thinks it's immoral to use software without paying for it, even if the creator doesn't WANT to be paid for it. You think it's immoral for software to be used by the military, even when the military spends most of their time NOT killing people. I think it's immoral for software to be used by spammers and the only surviving cousin of King Mathldefi of Nigeria, who only needs my help because his birth certificate was burned in the great war of 1841. This IS the point. Once you cross that line and start putting down those arbitrary decisions based on your own little moral code, the software loses its freedom. And that makes Baby Jesus cry.
SWM seeks new sig for a brief fling
The US Military has been, especially in the last century, really good at mainly targeting some pretty bad dictators recently. I mean unless you think we should've sat down for a mutual wank session with Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Milosevich, or Saddam. Even Ho Chi Minh was a pretty bad dude. The US Military has also been extremely good about only going places and killing people your elected politicians have sent them to... wait a minute. I forgot, they don't do what they're told by scumbag politicians. That's not what a military does these days.
Wait... the US didn't sit down for mutual wank sessions with Stalin? The US used the full force of its military to bring down Mao?
You think it's immoral for software to be used by the military, even when the military spends most of their time NOT killing people.
The military spends most of its time either killing people or coming up with more efficient ways of killing people.
I don't even neccesarily think its immoral to let your software be used to that end, I just don't want mine to be used that way.
Once you cross that line and start putting down those arbitrary decisions based on your own little moral code, the software loses its freedom.
Call me crazy, but when it comes down to people or software losing their freedom, I'm going to side with people. Not that the two are neccesarily mutually exclusive, but since I wrote the software, it seems like its my call.