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You can whine to the moderator if you want, but I still find it troubling that you supposedly work for the US Army but spend all day advocating free software for US adversaries.

Working 20 years and counting, unlike you. I advocate free software where it is an advantage. It is an advantage to us, obviously, as exemplified by Beowulf. That others get it is a consequence of getting that advantage. The only thing you care about is certain others getting it. Sorry GE, but reciprocity goes both ways.

And if our government writes some great, ultra-sensitive code based on open source, all it has to do is not release it. But it gets the advantage of not having to develop the base software.

It is up to the author whether to decide to release his code. If you say he can't, then you do not respect "intellectual property" rights as much as you claim to.

Nasa did not require free operating systems to design Beowulf,

NASA required free software because they had to be able to extensively modify the kernel to suit their needs. You can't do that with closed-source. The ability to modify ("Freedom to Tinker") is the greatest aspect of open source. You don't have to hope Microsoft gives you what you want, you simply make it happen yourself.

That is one reason why Microsoft is barely seen in supercomputing and Linux is prevalent, that Microsoft has one system way down on the Top 500, and Linux systems with the same architecture get much more computational power per processor/GHz.

Systems located in America are three fifths of the supercomputers in the world. The vast majority of those run Linux, and constitute almost all Linux supercomputers worldwide. This is a higher percentage of dominance than before Linux came on the supercomputing scene.

Just think, that wouldn't be as rosy for us if it were not for free software.

BTW, remember how a Beowulf is self-made? Self-made systems, only have five spots on the Top 500, and four of those are Apple XServe clusters in the US.

I can match years with you any day, and variety of equipment. Every thing you say is contrary to the US government's responsibility to protect our information. I go to traning constantly about how to better secure our data, and especially our technology. There is NEVER any discussion about how we should be freely releasing our technology over the internet in such a liberal way that potential adversaries can immediately download that technology for their use. It is completely contrary to our duty, and way of conducting operations.

If ANY such endeavor was to ever be considered, a fact finding study should have been conducted into the definitive pros and cons of the policy, and quantitative analysis as to the exact impact to our operations. Of course, none of that has been done, and instead we have to deal with the liberals deeply embedded in our government and teacher unions, which try to push this philosophy as quickly and quietly as possible, and when called on it like yourself seem to want to claim we actually somehow benefit from the ridiculous giveaways.

America's Unix companies including Apple who you mentioned were certainly available to help develop clustering software, or NASA could have keep their research private or at least kept the resulting technology in a controlled environment. This is the most powerful software in the world. Yet you like Stallman feel the Cubans and Russians and Vietnamese and Syrians and Iranians all somehow deserve a free copy of our research. While we get nothing but a knife in the back in return.