US Navy buys Linux to guide drone fleet (The Register)

End of the day, The US government is in a unique position in that it can redefine the rules for itself at the drop of a hat. Already there are clauses in the US code which set statutory limits on damages the federal government can pay as well to a US citizen who makes an infringement claim. And in fact those clauses actually define a concept of willful intent to set the damage aware(so yes intent does come into play to some extent). However compared to the cost of the lost munition itself, the maximum capped damage award is really not that big of a cost. I fully expect that if the issue of munitions (or generally captured US military equipment) comes up for discussion in a court room Congress will feel the urge to carve this out as an explicit fair-use case without losing much sleep over it.

The DoD is doing the bulk of protecting itself by demanding contractors hand over ownership of any proprietary code to the Defense Department instead of holding on to it as a contractor. Which is interesting...

But the real question I have, and I'm sure this will actually be put to the test at some point is the following. Is the federal government really one entity or does distribution clauses latch when one governmental agency hands code to another agency? Is the Defense department itself one entity? Handing code between the Navy and the Airforce..does that latch the distribution clause? They have their own separate logistics and r&d budgets..managed as separate from a day-to-day logistics pov. If they share it with Homeland...is it distribution? I'm really not sure that the federal government can be view as one entity for the purposes of distribution. I'm not even sure the DoD should be view that way...considering how compartmentalized and resource competitive each agency inside the DoD is with the others.

-jef

In the case of your ftp site, the fact that you set it up for public access is likely to be a strong counter-argument to your claim that it was for personal use. Especially if it can be shown that you knew how to set up a private ftp site and/or the plaintiffs can find any evidence that you revealed the site's existence to others.

Intent is why "loopholes" in the GPL, like distributing patches-only, generally don't work (ask NeXT about this one).

On the flip side, with the missiles, if the enemy capturing a missile and reverse-engineering it were to count as distribution, then it probably wouldn't be safe to use any software except BSD-licensed. Microsoft would be no happier about having their code copied than a GPL author.

Of course nowadays they have have given up the pretense and lies about the planned uses of unmanned drones, so these may really be just for reconnaissance. They have much larger and more powerful drones for carrying a wide variety of ordinance now then they had in the past.

Right now I expect they are aiming to eliminate the need for civilian contractors to handle the drones in a Xbox fashion. Maybe the goal with these is to explore and establish the procedures of more more autonomous craft. So they can reduce the number of operational people needed in large scale sorties. So before with older systems you'd need 20 operators for 10 drones you might get away with 20 operators for 200 or 300 drones.

As far as drones vs cruise missiles; I am sure that drones have a number of advantages over cruise missiles. One of them is, I expect, they can loiter over a area for long periods of time and be used to identify targets before striking. That way when they bomb a residence of 20 or 30 people the lawyers in the State Department and/or the Military can be reasonably sure that at least one of them is a likely target. Since hte drone is weaponized and already in the area you don't have to wait long before the approval process to finished before you carry out the actually attack. Another likely advantage is that larger drones can be used to carry multiple warheads and weapon platforms that will give them more flexibility and multiple strike capabilities that older more primitive cruise missiles lacked. Especially for 'soft targets'. And in addition they are re-usable so the total operational of cost over a period of months or years is much less then with using a long string of big cruise missiles.