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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?"
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.
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)
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.