Re: Would You Fly an Airplane with a Linux-Based Control System?

[Simon Wright <simon@pushface.org>]

Brian May <bam@snoopy.apana.org.au> writes:

> >>>>> "Simon" == Simon Wright <simon@pushface.org> writes:
> 
>     Simon> bitbucket@invalid-domain-see-sig.nil (Robert Kaiser)
>     Simon> writes:
> 
>     >> Very True. In fact, I think open source even has (or could
>     >> have) an advantage in mission critical applications because of
>     >> the potentially huge number and skill of reviewers.
> 
>     Simon> They have to be competent and -- possibly more difficult --
>     Simon> motivated!
> 
> open source doesn't mean unpaid for...

But (my point was) that if you expect a huge number of reviewers you
must pay them in some currency; and giving them something really
interesting to review is one approach.

> If a company really wants an open source solution, they can pay
> programmers to write and maintain it. They can sell the hardware
> with the source code to the customer giving the customer the
> security they can check every line of the code independently for
> safety if they so desire (and not just take the companies word for
> it when it says it is "safe").
> 
> I doubt this is going to happen though, for a variety of
> reasons. One such reason is if the customer has access to the source
> code, presumably they can change it; I doubt the aviation
> authorities are going to like this... In this country, for instance
> to get a GPS receiver that is rated for GPS
> non-precision-approaches, the software *must* be written so that GPS
> way points cannot be updated accept via approved update.

Our prime customer (the UK MoD) usually requires full source
disclosure anyway, to that would be nothing new.

I don't see that being able to view the source necessarily equates to
being able to change a delivered system in the field. You would have
thought that some digital signing technique/dongle would be possible
-- after all, if a customer wanted to change the firmware he could,
with enough physical access.

-- 
Simon Wright                               100% Ada, no bugs.