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Android Goes To the Battlefield
wiseandroid writes "Google's mobile operating system Android has won plenty of adherents among cellphone makers and gadget manufacturers since its 2007 debut. Now defense contractor Raytheon is preparing it for a more urgent mission: saving lives in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan. Using Android software tools, Raytheon engineers have built a basic application for military personnel that combines maps with a buddy list. Raytheon calls the entire framework the Raytheon Android Tactical System, or RATS for short. Mark Bigham, a vice president of business development in Raytheon's Intelligence and Information Systems unit, says the company selected Android because its open source nature made developing applications easy."
Why do breathless writers always say "saving lives" when they refer to military applications? They're about taking lives. Just taking different ones.
The lives they're saving are on our side. Also, this article isn't talking about Android being used as a weapon.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Android apps don't have to pass through a central app store to get widely distributed to a set of Android phones. So the military can limit distribution of the apps. They could even distribute an Android OS distro with a crypto key that is bonded to that phone's serial#, which is needed by any app to run or even to decompress/decrypt from the distribution package, so military apps can't be used or inspected outside the military's own phones.
Is there any way to do something like that on iPhones? Like at least just developing an app that doesn't get run through Apple at all (signing or uploaded to the App Store), but is just an install package downloadable from a website (perhaps with a password) and installable on a phone, perhaps with an unlock code. AFAICT, that's all locked out by Apple's iPhone architecture. Has anyone figured out how to do "distributed distribution", without needing Apple at the center of all of it? On iPhones that aren't jailbroken, just the stock iPhones that anyone can have?
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make install -not war
Is there any way for contributors to the free software movement to block use of their software by military contractors?
That would be contrary to the goals of the GPL, which aims to grant freedom to use the software for any purpose and to modify it to achieve those purposes. You'd need to use a different license to achieve your aims.
To summarise the summary of the summary: people are a problem. ~ h2g2
If you shoot a projectile that contains embedded GPL'd code do you have to provide the victim with a copy of the code since there was a "distribution"?
"No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country."
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
I'm most certainly not a liberal or a neocon - but you've sampled the Koo-Aid. The fact is, life in Iraq was much more stable under Saddam than it is today. Immeasurably more stable. You really should find some articles about the bookstores in Iraq. What happened to them epitomizes what has happened throughout Iraq.
Yeah, Saddam was an evil sumbitch, and he deserved to die, but he was a stabilizing force, no matter how much we disliked him. IMHO, pure arrogance on the part of a neocon president forced the military to invade Iraq.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br