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."
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.
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
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.
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!"
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
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
Sure, RH and SuSE (corporate) pricing is up there. On the other hand, you don't HAVE to pay that much for a Linux solution, as there are a number of well respected distributions available, some specifically designed for the corporate market, for the very reason of being disenchanted with RH and SuSE pricing. It may be a bit more work to look into these than "go with the norm", but that decision depends on your priorities, just like the decision to consider Linux, instead of just going with MS out of blind ignorance.
:)
OTOH, MS pricing is MS pricing, and about the only way to get a better deal is to tell MS you're thinking of switching to Linux. So even if you are determined to stick with MS, come hell or high water, it wouldn't kill you to learn more about Linux (beyond the FUD), as it gives you more bargaining power. If, along the way, you realize that Linux is a good solution, all the better.
That should tell you something in itself.
Microsoft has just released their much anticipated hands-free cordless mouse. Warning, it may hurt a little at first.
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
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.
I agree NMCI has it's problems. I am an NMCI user. I'm also a govt site rep so I see more than just the users perspective. Once some of the major issues are sorted out, it will improve in both usability and flexibility. Speed will continue to be an issue because the Navy has not put any emphasis on speed. Usability is not the number 1 item on the priority list. Security and the ability to understand what the Navy is spending on IT are the top two requirements.
Since when are NMCI and OSS software mutually exclusive? The Navy Approved Software (DADMS) list does have a fair amount of OSS software listed.
As for your comment "Developed can't access email without logging out..." - that's just plain false. You can either run Outlook and put in your normal account credentials when prompted, or simply use the runas command (think su). I'm always logged in with my regular account and use runas for anything that needs admin rights. No need to wait 15-minutes to log in/out.