Work Progressing on Army's Future Combat Systems

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El_Oscuro brings us a Washington Post update on the progress of Future Combat Systems, the U.S. Army's Linux-based operating environment that has been under development for several years. The project, which currently surpasses 63 million lines of code, has received criticism for having a scope greater than that which the Army can manage. Since the program's inception, integration of commercial applications has increased the amount of code, but has also saved the developers time and money.

"Boeing and the Army said they chose not to use Microsoft's proprietary software because they didn't want to be beholden to the company. Instead, they chose to develop a Linux-based operating system based on publicly available code. Boeing's Schoen said that it is designing software so that if soldiers lose their connection, the software will automatically "heal itself," retrieving the information within seconds without rebooting."

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#1 vipwoody on 25 Jan 2008 - 10:15

geez

#2 XerXis on 25 Jan 2008 - 10:16

ooow look, i have the biggest e-penis! 63.8M lines of code! look at me!

#3 boho on 25 Jan 2008 - 10:24

Another step towards the Linux "critical mass".

#4 Benjo85au on 25 Jan 2008 - 11:21

Would not want to be the beta tester for that

Regardz

(1 reply) #5 El Sid on 25 Jan 2008 - 12:12

So because Linux is being utilised, does this mean that they must release the source code?

#5.1 ichi on 25 Jan 2008 - 12:27

Only if they distribute it outside the army (which I guess they wont).

(1 reply) #6 sorlag on 25 Jan 2008 - 12:21

Since when does linecount equal quality or something else than bugs?

#6.1 markjensen on 25 Jan 2008 - 12:29

In this case, they are using line counts appropriately. To show that a project is very f-ing huge. I don't see anywhere they are trying to claim that it is a "good" thing; quite the contraray, actually.

(1 reply) #7 Magallanes on 25 Jan 2008 - 12:24

Linux can be good but not as good that a REAL UNIX. For example BSD is way more secure that any linux distro on the market.

#7.1 ichi on 25 Jan 2008 - 12:30

Commercial unixes obviously don't fit this project (and looks like neither does *BSD).

(1 reply) #8 night_stalker_z on 25 Jan 2008 - 13:04

What is the software suppose to actually do?

#8.1 markjensen on 25 Jan 2008 - 14:03

I'm not sure, exactly, but there is a wikipedia article on it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Combat_Systems

#9 Naveen on 25 Jan 2008 - 13:24

Maybe it's meant to help light the batcave. Somewhere.

#10 A Clockwork Lime on 25 Jan 2008 - 14:52

Okay, so the military is incompetent and puts in worthless extra man-hours to do **** at great expense. This is surprising... how exactly?

#11 toadeater on 26 Jan 2008 - 02:50

Future Combat System = US economic recession.

#12 toadeater on 26 Jan 2008 - 02:53

We'll see if they can really make this better than GRAW.

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