Work Progressing on Army's Future Combat Systems

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."

Zombie

[Krneki]

Damn, I was looking forward to zombie soldiers.

Oh please...

[drDugan]

software will automatically "heal itself," retrieving the information

Anthropomorphizing technology is rather misleading... especially in this case, "when death is on the line!"

BSOD tradeoff.

[bobdotorg]

So by avoiding Windows, no BSOD on the battlefield. But instead we risk a Colonel Panic? (sorry)

Re:Oh please...

[Anonymous Coward]

Truly you have a dizzying intellect.

Born to Kill

[clarkn0va]

So are we going to see an official logo featuring Tux with "Born to Kill" scratched on his helmet?

db

This is great!

[Alexx K]

Now the troops can compile Gentoo while on duty. Hopefully, it'll be finished when they get home.

Re:Oh please...

[Anonymous Coward]

To top it off, this news comes from a group who actually DID start a land war in Asia.

OR

[AndGodSed]

General: "Where are my tanks!?"
Tech Officer: "Coming sir, we're having some dependency problems..."

Blame game

[Wowsers]

If anything goes wrong with the project, they could always say it's General Protection's Fault.

Here we go again

[Anonymous Coward]

Gawd. Another gays in the military article.

hey!

[Anonymous Coward]

torrent plz

Re:OR

[XnPlater]

Tech Officer: "Anyway, now that we're compiling them with -O3, the enemy won't stand a chance, sir!"

Re:And Appropriately

[VON-MAN]

Damn right, and just as my linux computer here it can heal its connection withing seconds without booting! Anybody here use Windows? Loosers!!!

Now, let's read the article.

Several years of development...

[secretwhistle]

Perhaps it's time for them to upgrade to Reason 2.0.