Friday, February 15th, 2008
Was the Terminator powered by Linux? The US military is gung-ho for Linux and “Future Combat Systems”.
This is a strong testmament for why I always tell people… it’s guaranteed that in the long run, Linux will win. The only OS out there that will remain competitive is Windows (IMO). And Windows will compete and be successful for the opposite reasons Linux will. That’s ok, if Linux dominated the market, it would be a monopoly - although a nicer one than we currently have :-)
Some analysts tout open source software as one of the next great technology waves, comparable in its disruptive effects to personal computing and the Internet. That future is already partly here for the U.S. military, with programs such as the Army’s Future Combat Systems (FCS) and organizations such as the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) using open technologies.
http://www.military-information-technology.com/article.cfm?DocID=2326
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February 15th, 2008 at 7:59 pm
Tel said:
I dunno, the various BSD’s just seem to keep on going (including Apple’s tarted up BSD). The BSD crowd don’t seem to build features as fast as Linux, but they don’t give up either.
I mean you would think the same about programming languages, how could Python ever be competitive when it does basically what Perl was already doing for 5 years before? For that matter, why would you use Ruby to do what you could already do in Python (and Perl)? Yet, every time you look around someone seems to be starting up a new computer language that does the same stuff.
People seem to like finding new and different ways to do things and they enjoy trying out new operating systems too (at least, enough people do this to keep some diversity in the market).
February 15th, 2008 at 8:52 pm
Don Marti said:
The US military has to plan long-term. Major IT projects can stay active for decades. SAGE was run on vacuum tubes and stayed up from 1959-1993.
Look at the US trade deficit with the People’s Republic of China, and the increasing trend of PRC companies making acquisitions in the US IT industry. If the US DoD buys a proprietary OS for a defense IT system today, chances are that within the system’s useful life the OS will be under PRC control.