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DARPA Publishes Tons of Open Source Code, Data
An anonymous reader sends this news from The Verge:
"The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, sponsors a lot of technology through grants to universities and private labs, with projects running the gamut from robots to electroencephalography caps, to software and new programming languages. A lot of that knowledge is open source, but it hasn't always been easy to access. Today, DARPA has responded to requests from the research and development community by publishing the DARPA Open Catalog, a website that aggregates source code and other data for all public DARPA-funded projects."
Chris White, DARPA program manager, said, "Making our open source catalog available increases the number of experts who can help quickly develop relevant software for the government. Our hope is that the computer science community will test and evaluate elements of our software and afterward adopt them as either standalone offerings or as components of their products."
not open-sourced yet?
Yes, although it's a pretty stupid unit to use for the numbers involved.
... whatever
Of course, when printed.
If it's coming from the government, it's usually measured in shit-tons.
This is a good start. If "we the people" pay to develop software, then it makes sense to ensure that "we the people" can use it, improve it, and distribute those improvements by default. See http://freethecode.org/ for others who think that makes sense too.
The URL http://www.dwheeler.com/govern... has a longer list of software released by US governments (federal, state, or local) as open source software. It even identifies a few meta-lists like this one. I'm sure it's incomplete, but it shows that US governments do release open source software. I'd love to hear of other examples of such software (with URLs that prove that the government paid to develop or improve it).
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
And can be promptly re-written to be "safe"
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Any code can have backdoors. Any open-source code can be checked in the same way for backdoors. So what's the difference?
And kilo and mega tons. Its the 'bama.
DARPA Publishes Tons of Open Source Code, Data
Why does everything think it's so cool to use a comma instead of the word "and" in a headline? Does the printed media even still do it?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
With all this talk of "shit-tons" and "back doors" shouldn't we be measuring in "butt loads"?
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
Your tax dollars at work
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I seriously don't get how this is possible. Weren't we all told that works by the federal government automatically fall into the public domain (except classified works) since the federal government *can't* hold copyrights? How is having a university create the work with federal money any different from the feds doing it themselves? (It would be a "work for hire" if it *were* copyrightable.) And the whole concept of copyleft licenses depends on copyrights, ironically, so you can't release something under GPL etc. if you don't hold the copyright.
So this all sounds as if we're supposed to be happy about the government actually doing much less than it was supposed to do, or overreaching and doing what it can't do, depending on how you look at it. Every single line of code they've ever written is ours ours ours, no strings attached, unless it's classified.
OK rip me to pieces.
Can source code be measured in tons?
Is that Metric or Imperial? We wouldn't want to mess up the conversion....