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Open Source Software In the Military
JohnMoD writes With the advent of forge.mil, etc. the military seems to be getting on board with free and open source software. A working group meeting is going to be held at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, August 12-13, 2009. There's a pretty good lineup of speakers including a Marine from the Iraq-Marine Expeditionary Forces, who was on the ground and saw the agility open source gave to him and his soldiers. A number of OSS projects are going to be meeting there: Delta 3D, OpenCPI, FalconView, OSSIM, Red Hat, etc. Looks like there will be some good discussions."
No you are wrong.
When Microsoft's products crash (guidance tracking on cruise missiles) THEY SAVE LIVES.
and do I honestly think I'll ever see any of this stuff?
Absolutely not. They have civilian contractors to do all the cool stuff. I'm a network administrator who is denied administrative rights
How many of those civilian contractors are veterans who used to do your job when they were in the military? Just because the government decided to use civilian contractors doesn't mean you don't have a career path, it's just not necessarily one that stays in the military.
-- Support a free market in the field of government
Having worked for the Royal Dutch Navy for several years as a programmer and software architect, I'm impressed by their use of open source software on board their combat platforms. For instance, the Landing Platform Dock 2, HrMs Johann de Witt, uses GNU/Linux as a main component in the Combat Management System. Other platforms, including their submarines also uses various degrees of open source in combination with older proprietary systems.
It is funny that people assume that open source means more secure. It means more potential for security, since you can undertake an enormous, in-depth code review, but given the amount of code in some projects (the Linux kernel, Apache, etc.), that is not something that is likely to happen. It is not terribly difficult to hide a defect in some code -- a cool example of this is the Underhanded C Coding Contest, where the goal is to introduce a vulnerability in such a way that reading through the source does not give an obvious indication of what happened.
Now, if the military is controlling the code that is committed to certain projects, that is another story. Then they can see enhanced security from day 1, by ensuring that every patch is thoroughly reviewed -- a much smaller task than trying to re-verify years of review from some other project.
Palm trees and 8
Anyone on this forum heard of TCP/IP? Maybe I am getting old, but I remember the internet as a DARPA project. Source got distributed and ported to whatever you OS you happened to be using. Sounds like open source to me.