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Australian Defence Force Builds $1.7m Linux-Based Flight Simulator

Posted by timothy on from the send-some-love-to-flightgear dept.

scrubl writes "The Australian Defence Force (ADF) has revealed its latest flight simulator runs on SUSE Linux-based clusters of Opteron servers and uses an open source graphics platform. The Defence Science and Technology Organisation's (DSTO) Air Operations Simulation Centre in Melbourne creates virtual worlds that allow pilots to experience real-world combat situations without leaving the ground. The visuals software was written in OpenGL, using commercial and open source scene graph engines and making 'heavy use of OpenGL Shader Language programs.'"

1 of 232 comments (clear)

  1. Re:OOS should never be used for war by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    You can sit back and say "I don't want to help fight a war" but after a certain distance away from the matter things are so fungible it's ridiculous. Practically speaking, the Feds could a) build a simulator on free software with your kernel hacks or b) build a simulator on expensive with Microsoft Windows with a little more overhead, spend more on software and computers, and sending more tax money to our friends the Defense Contractors and Microsoft. And the world is a better place because... it... uh, huh, hmm....

    Right, because the overwhelming cost of a military simulator is the operating system on which it runs. </sarcasm>