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Linux Powers Military UGV
An anonymous reader writes "Linux powers a new autonomous unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) that learns routes by following along behind foot-soldiers, after which it can retrace the route solo, avoiding obstacles. iRobot's "R-Gator" UGV is based on John Deere's 658cc, diesel-powered M-Gator military utility vehicle platform, with control, navigation, and object-avoidance systems based on BlueCat Linux from LynuxWorks. I wonder how Linux idealists feel about their cute little OS being deployed in machinery of war?"
I wonder if the DARPA Grand Challenge competition had anything to do with this? Personally I'd like to see more competitions like that. The success of the X-Prize should tell us how well competition drives creativity and inovation.
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
Is there any conflict between the government and the GPL? If so, that will be neat, becuase the government will use its sovereign powers to trump anything in the GPL.
That stands to reason, as the government is responsible for making the Copyright laws.
In the Blackberry/RIM case, the government can tell the court that it wants to keep on using the patented stuff, even though the court may say that the government hasn't bought the product from the guys that own the patent. The court will then order Blackberry to keep operating, but only for the government accounts. NTP can go jump in a lake.
That is a standard its-good-to-be-the-soverign legal doctrine.
Also, the government can compel licensing of patented things -- if it serves national interest. More its-good-to-be-the-sovereign legal doctrine. There is a guy who invented a neat device that got used to splice into an underground cable. The government complelled a license and slapped some heave duty national-security/secrecy mojo on it -- the inventor is screwed.
The GPL poses certain burdens for contractors (unlike, say, the BSD/MIT license) I wonder if the government will ever say -- don't follow the GPL. The sovereign says so. We don't want the bad guys to have access to it.
This would be interesting, because many Linux contributors are foreign, and not subject to the sovereignty of the US-of-A.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
You are so dead on. Wish I had mod points. Did you steal the religion line from someone, because I like it. Consider it stolen (uh, I mean, GPL'd)
Anyways, it's hilarious that the slashdot groupthink has grown to the levels that people actually think that -everyone- who participates in the Linux process and believes in the open-source concept also, then, must share some supposed common anti-war pacifism or some other such nonsense. Someone please explain to me how being pro-war (whatever that means) is against the "linux ideal". Or, did the submitted actually mean, "I wonder how the people who read slashdot and are generally anti-war but also generally pro-linux are going to react to this". I guess that doesn't roll the same way off the tongue, so a little leeway of poetic liscense is necessary. Even still, I don't remember only agreeing to a strict anti-war anti-republican anti-wiretapping oath of allegience before muddling around in the memory management code... but that's just me.. I might have missed it. For some reason I thought the open-source software movement was about quality code... and not about war.. I didn't realize what exactly I was signing up for when I installed Gentoo.
Since iRobot has strong MIT roots and congratulated the first hackers who modified their Roomba. Later, iRobot released full specifications for the original Roomba and more hacking efforts bloomed.
Oh, and as for the government? This is the same government which released BRL-CAD and NASA World Wind, and sponsored the development of the Reiser filesystem and OK WebServer (kicks Apache in the ass for dynamic sites) among countless other open source projects. Oh, and heard of SELinux? From the big bad NSA? This is all irrelevant though; the DoD did not design this vehicle, iRobot did. iRobot owns the code, not the government
As for distribution - militaries exchange technology. The British buy from the Americans and vice versa, for example. That will certainly be covered by the GPL, which means first-tier allies of the US are likely to get hold of such code at some point.
It's unclear what this would mean for the - uh - dodgier arms deals. (The contra scandal, the sales to Saddam Hussein, munitions to Osama bin Laden to fight the Russians, etc.) Would the US Government feel obliged to honor the license when it conducts illegal arms deals? Probably not. If the technology proved that vital for them to use, they'd find a way to use Eminent Domain or some such rule to claim exemption or ownership.
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)
I wonder how Linux idealists feel about their cute little OS being deployed in machinery of war?
Considering all it does is run a patrol and alert when people are coming INTO a base presumably up to something dastardly - I imagine it would feel pretty good to deploy something like that would help save lives.
Would it help the submitter if the first deployment were to patrol a buidling full of bunny rabbits and baby chicks to keep wolves at bay?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The Nintendo emulator won't cluster that well and isn't CPU intensive enough. Now, if you'd said that they'd uploaded copies of bzflag and freeciv server on one, xmame on a second and were doing a distributed compile from scratch of Gentoo or Fedora Core on the rest, it would be believable. :)
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)
...I think there's a much bigger swords/plowshares issue with the John Deere engine than the OS.
There's no failure quite as dissatisfying as a complete and total solution to the wrong problem.
Not all inventions are products of warfare or hostility. In general, inventions are a product of need, with greater need yielding greater inventions. War generates need, so all wars will see inventiveness increase, but need does not require war. It is a one-way relationship.
Should the military use GPLed technology? Provided they honor the license and the spirit, yes. I believe they should. In fact, I'd almost prefer it if it were mandatory. Why? Because if you share what you are doing - even with a limited few - and reduce the secrecy, you will also reduce the sort of paranoia that tends to lead to conflict. If you look at the recent war with Iraq and the building tensions with Iran, what is the common factor? Secrecy on all sides, paranoia on all sides, resulting in tension and finally hostilities. Furthermore, it is between highly unequal forces, leading to the notion of an eventual "victory". Near-equal forces, as existed in the "Cold War", are much keener to avoid conflict. GPLing the armed services, therefore, could be one step towards reducing the need for military interventions.
Then there's the "viral" nature of the GPL. Again, this assumes that the GPL is honored in spirit and in letter. The technology will be sold to close allies, who can then alter the sourcecode for their own needs - within that particular system and for other devices. Those other devices will therefore carry GPLed code. Eventually, through enough such steps, the code will reach dual-purpose technology. Probably pretty quickly, too. When that happens, all of the improvements will flood back into the civilian world.
Finally, I believe that there are members of the armed services who value the Open Source community and want to sustain it. The military, more than anyone else, know how to make software secure. In this day and age, with viruses, trojans and worms running rampant, I certainly think that the military could play a major role in reducing or eliminating malware. They know more about trust systems, authentication of information, controlling access without debilitating operations, fault tolerence in hostile environments, high volume information processing without inflicting DDoS attacks on themselves, etc, than anyone else. That knowledge, donated back into the F/OSS community, could revolutionise computing as we know it. I don't think it can hurt to give them the opportunity.
Yes, Einstein regretted the bomb. Arguably, nuclear weapons technology was a bit of a mistake - it wasn't needed to get Japan to surrender and has opened up more cans of worms across the world than I care to imagine. Arguably, though, it was inevitable. There have been natural runaway reactions, so someone would have discovered how to cause one eventually through simple geology. Either that, or through a nuclear reactor accident.
(Knowing more about the nature of critical mass reactions may actually have prevented far worse accidents than have been caused through malice. We'll never know the answer to that one, but it seems a possibility.)
Uncontrolled nuclear explosions, through proposed derivatives of the Orion Project, may yet have a valuable function in space exploration, too, in a way that might not be practical by other means. When people say that something can cut both ways, they usually mean that there's a negative side to something appearing positive. What they forget is that the statement doesn't stop there. It also means that - if you choose to seek it out - there can be a positive side to something that appears negative.
I'm not sa
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)
I wonder how Linux idealists feel about their cute little OS being deployed in machinery of war?
I feel like Einstein after the two A-bombs on Japan. I feel like Mikhail Kalashnikov seeing his designer gun on TV where it was used to pump up a couple of hundred kids.
Seriously, what's wrong with Linux being used in this project? You a Windows user man?
LOL. The GPLv3 does not seem to explicitly cover this case either. My take would be that distribution needs to be intentional for the rules governing full source code disclosure to apply. Otherwise, a thief entering the premises of a bank's EDP department and leaving with tapes containing program binaries would be entitled to copies of the source code if the programs were based on GPL code.
The John Deere platform is only available to military users. It has a really nice, small, advanced Diesel engine so should be very cheap to run. It looks dirt simple to work on. Far from being restricted, they should be giving them away with a grant to anyone working on autonomous vehicles, and to me. Because I want one. No, make that two. In fact, give them away free to anyone who has ever worked in vehicle research, because you will then see the state of the art in autonomy advance by leaps and bounds. Why? Because there is currently no suitable cheap, widely available platform. The Darpa challenge was won by a modified VW van, with a huge array of platforms behind it. Standardising around a simple, low cost, low power vehicle which is already tough would put future teams on a level playing field, ensuring that it was the superior systems that won the day, and that no-one could profit from their ability to buy mechanical muscle.
Pining for the fjords