The government pays for the development costs. They will not pay for a subscription unless the contractor takes the up front risk of developing the software.
Federal contracting rules also limit the profit that can be made selling to the government (you can argue this are not effective).
Some 'agile fans' have been promoted up a few notches at Lockheed, that is all this is.
The USG likes to pay for and own source code and weapon system designs.
> Some 'agile fans' have been promoted up a few notches at Lockheed, that is all this is.
Maybe. I definitely do not have first hand knowledge of anything.
What I do remember is that a few months ago SpaceX's Starlink was playing cat-and-mouse games with Russian jamming attempts. They had an issue where the Russians couldn't jam an already established connection, but because of some protocol weakness they could jam the establishment of new connections. Within a very short amount of time they patched it and rolled out a fix both to their satellites and the receivers which negated that particular jamming attack.
When that happened Dave Tremper director of electronic warfare for the Office of the Secretary of Defense commented that they envy that level of agility. He said that current way how the Pentagon responds to such challenges would have taken much much longer.
Not saying that this recent news is directly related to that event, but observations like that can prompt the defense sector to offer solutions like this.
operational use, this was a specific problem, and it was imposing on mission success. those get fixed fast, even on manned aircraft platforms. (time more likely in weeks, rather than days).
space-X hopefully did a risk review. what is the chance this "100 line fix" is going to break something else? what was the in lab coverage? can it be rolled back?
sometimes you say you want agility; but you would really prefer low risk of greater failure.
At some point we as a society need to admit that both the space program and the "defense" sector are just jobs programs and aren't really there to build anything useful. One need only look at the Space Launch System or the F-35.
They're mechanisms for transferring tax money to gigantic employers that employ people across zillions of different congressional districts. It's a doublespeak to avoid having millions of people on a program that would otherwise be termed "socialism" or "welfare".
SpaceX/Starlink, on the other hand, are more interested in shipping and servicing customers and getting revenue thereby than being approved by a constituency and/or the existing military-industrial complex.
The DoD and SpaceX were built for drastically different purposes, and it's no surprise that they have drastically different change control procedures.
I personally find the fact that world’s 2nd or 3rd most feared military is getting its ass kicked by the US defense sector’s bargain bin a strong argument against your point.
There’s obviously a ton of pork and SLS in particular is a known welfare program, but that’s not a fair critique of F-35 nor of the defense sector writ large.
The F35 program is really blown out of proportion. Yes it is easy to criticize and point to many mistakes, but the fact is that virtually every next generation fighter project is a colossal management nightmare. I find it somewhat confusing that the F22 is universally beloved yet it is arguably a failure of sorts (limited production run, few prospects for its future).
Honestly I feel like the F35 is a target in the “information warfare” space. While the project is not above criticism, China/Russia/etc have every reason to promote animosity towards the project.
> The USG likes to pay for and own source code and weapon system designs.
Surprisingly, the contractors retain copyrights and trademarks somehow. For example, apparently you need a license to put an f-22 or an f-35 in a game (or movie etc?), I think those things necessarily belong to the taxpayers. Weird licensing.
Apparently the contracts for the F35 didn't mention "Intellectual property" at all, and now the government now regrets the oversight (especially with regards to the source code for the software running on those planes) [1]
As for licensing to put the f-22/f-35 in a game/movie, I wonder how much of that is actually needed from a legal perspective, and how much is "lets just do it anyway".
The name is covered by trademark so you need a license to call it "F-35 Lightning", but I don't think the design or shape of an aircraft is covered by copyright or trademark law, so it should be fine if you just avoid the name.
Car and aircraft bodies generally fall under the “useful articles” exception, so they are not copyrightable. Otherwise they would be sculptures.
There is a separate regime that covers useful articles: design patents, which have a much shorter term. The design patents can AFAIK cover things like toys, I don’t know about game assets. You might have to look at the actual grant of patent rights to see what is claimed. I don’t get the impression that the big aircraft manufacturers care about games for plane nerds.
It's because DoD contracts require or greatly favor "agile" practices via CMMI and ISO certs. Government employees are too incompetent to understand how the big 5 simply pull the wool over their eyes, like they do for everything.
So, there's a for-profit company selling the SAFe "process"? Does this have something to do with filling in new government checkbox requirements for contractors?
My first job out of college was a small defense contractor that underwent ISO 9001 Certification for Agile process. I was a junior engineer who didn't know any better, so I look back bemused over all the really silly things that org did.
My wife also works for a defense contractor. Our nightly conversations kind of get tiring because virtually all she ever does is complain about it. They moved at some point away from including detailed requirements and specific feature sets in contracts to instead purchasing, I believe at this point in 12-week at a time intervals, some number of "story points," where story point is defined to be some number of labor hours at an average rate, rather than an actual story point. So what happens is the government and contractor work together to establish some backlog of possible features they might want, and I think quarterly, developers have to hold some ceremonies giving very rough estimates of how many story points each of these might be worth, even though at this point they are not discretized into user stories. Moreover, everyone has to do this, so even if you have some team whose main purpose is onboarding new users and providing maintenance and support of a development environment, they have to estimate workload in terms of stories and story points and burn these down as they respond to ad hoc support tickets.
Moreover, since they're "agile," they no longer have any kind of dedicated testing teams, so developers are responsible for creating and maintaining all of the test suites. But they're evaluated on velocity, not reliability, and velocity is defined as story points delivered, which is measured by tickets closed, but since labor hours are purchased in fixed buckets, the definition of done becomes "we ran out of hours," so in practice, developers just don't write real tests, everything always passes, and nothing actually works.
More moreover, even though the government has pushed all of its contractors to adapt some kind of "DevOps" branding that implies you have broken down the traditional barriers between development and ops, in practice, development and ops are entirely separate contracts run by separate companies and purchased by separate directorates of your sponsoring agency, so in reality, as a development contractor, your work is purchased and approved by an acquisition office that doesn't actually own the operational environment and you're not even legally allowed to directly communicate with whoever actually does own and run that environment. All communication has to go through the acquisition office. So you end up delivering exactly what was asked for, but it doesn't get accepted because the organization that gets to accept or reject changes to production isn't the same organization that was involved with all of your planning and development activities.
I understand why she still works there. She's spent her entire career working on special access and compartmentalized projects, and I worked at this same place on similar geoint projects even before she did. In spite of what Hacker News would have you believe about the quality of military technology, you really do get to see amazing shit, including satellite capabilities I worked on a decade ago that the likes of Starlink and Google are still not close to matching, but I couldn't do it any more and left years ago.
Federal contracting rules also limit the profit that can be made selling to the government (you can argue this are not effective).
Some 'agile fans' have been promoted up a few notches at Lockheed, that is all this is.
The USG likes to pay for and own source code and weapon system designs.