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."