US Navy buys Linux to guide drone fleet | Hacker News Reader

US Navy buys Linux to guide drone fleet

theregister.co.uk

24 pointsstfu27 comments

  The US government can directly combine GPL and 
  proprietary/classified software into a single program 
  arbitrarily, as long as the result is never conveyed 
  outside the U.S. government

Just to be clear, this is true for any organization using GPL materials, correct?

Yes, though, as I understand it in this case the government is the user and the developer where as a lot of large companies avoid sharing changes by offering their software as a web service (ie: they don't have to distribute the binary) something which I believe changes to the GPL in v3 were supposed to address.

You're thinking of AGPL for requiring source distribution when offering a service over a network.

IANAL but I don't believe GPLv3 changes anything over GPLv2 in this case, although it does tighten up some loopholes in v2 over what does and does not qualify as "distribution" (although in all cases the end user is still sent the software to run on their hardware, not just the results of the software.)

The AGPL variant has a clause for web services, AFAIK the vanilla GPLv3 does no such thing.

Even if the government was buying it from Raytheon, this would only mean that the government must receive a copy of the source code under the GPL. It does not mean the software must be distributed freely to everyone.

As I understand it.

That's my understanding as well. If you distribute the software, you must distribute the source upon request. You're under no obligation to distribute something you develop for your own use, however.

Now if only I could get Linux on my Navy desktop, instead of winXP under NMCI. I have all but fired my issued desktop and do as much as possible on my iPad and MacBook.

Is virtualbox (or some other VM) not an option for you?

First of all, how in the world are they "buying" Linux from Raytheon? They're apparently buying 28M of "services" from Raytheon, not "Linux."

Second of all, what's up with all the stuff that one would think should be classified info showing up all over the media lately?

Political cheer-leading in an election year.

http://hotair.com/archives/2012/06/08/obama-im-offended-that...

Linkbait.

Guess they went with Redhat then?

They were controlling drones...with Windows XP? Oh my. Don't tell me they were logging through IE6, too.

Military procurement methods plus a culture of contract outsourcing do produce some amusing outcomes sometimes.

Had some fun on a Virgin Atlantic flight the other day. Entertainment system wasn't working and got to watch an attendant rebooting into Windows 98 over and over.. turns out the reason it takes 30+ minutes for the system to "reboot" is because ScanDisk is forced to run on every boot.

asked rms few months ago if it wouldn't make sense to change the gpl in the direction of "no military use allowed". he replied that would destroy the "free software philosophy". i disagree. hate the idea that human beings are killed with the help of gnu/linux and/or free software.

I have to agree with rms here. No X allowed is inherently anti-free software. In cases like this one has to think long term, as in how freer software can lead to freer societies, i.e. societies that escape government coercion. That itself I think will lead to a significant decrease in military activity because free uncoerced citizens can stop their governments from engaging in such self-destructive acts.

i know this all-or-nothing-argument and yes it is correct. it's about purity of the idea of free software, but killing humans is not pure. so how can the idea stay pure therefore?

and what do i tell my grandchildren if the ask me one day: "grandpa, why exactly did you write that big while-switch-statement which killed 6.000.000 people in 2016?"

err, why would you write a switch statement that kills all those people?

'Twas a bug; too lazy to write unit tests.

"I didn't write it so that 6 million people would be killed, nor did i write it for those people to use specifically. I wrote it to make people's lives easier and to advance human knowledge. I wrote it to create a tool that other could use. Like how people use a hammer. And just like a hammer, while most people used it how it was intended, some people used it to kill other people or to destroy things. Despite that, though, we don't ban hammers and stop making them.

Yes, some people used my code badly, and did horrible things with it, but others used it in spaceships and self driving cars. Ultimately what I made was a tool, and once something like code or an idea or a design is given to the world and the world sees how good it is, there is no way to restrict who uses it or how they use it.

My code is not inherently evil, nor is it inherently good. It just is. Others can use it to do good or to do bad, but at the end of the day, they are just using a tool to multiply the effects of their actions."

well, i sleept on that and came to the point that this problem is similar to the knife-problem: you can use a knife to butter your bread or to cut someone into little pieces - but that's not the knife's fault or the fault of the guy who made the knife or the guy who invented the concept of the knife.

therefore rms and you other smart bastards;) were right - i was wrong.

They are also protected by it; the sword has a few edges.

Linux is a tool that can used, or misused, for any purpose. Attack the use, not the tool.

Douglas Crockford's JSLInt and JSON license include the clause:

  The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil.

http://www.json.org/license.html

And JSLint was not used in Red Hat because of this (https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=455507) or Pylons (https://groups.google.com/d/msg/pylons-devel/rggWC8JVeAM/rQ6...).

Many people would claim the military use is intended for the Good. Opinions differ.

In this case, at least, these drones only carry recon/surveillance payloads - I believe the article said "non-weaponized" or something to that effect.

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