US Spends $11M To Kick-Start Video Search

coondoggie writes "The US military is inundated with video from airborne unmanned aircraft, remote monitoring systems and security outposts. In an effort to speed up the processing and analyzing of all this video, researchers at Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) this week awarded an almost $11 million contract to open source software vendor Kitware to help develop what DARPA calls its Video and Image Retrieval and Analysis Tool (VIRAT) program."

Comments

Kitware?

[guruevi]

That company is not truly open source. The only thing they do distribute is VTK (which is only a library under a BSD license) but programs that are actually useful without being a programmer (as most researchers that use this stuff are not programmers) are under a more restrictive license. It's similar to saying Mac OS X is open source because the kernel is open or Windows is open source because BIND and the TCP stack is derived from BSD. They use the open source label to get the community to fix their problems on some of their other stuff but the non-commercial releases are fairly unstable or plain useless.