1. Not everyone benefits. Companies that are part of the "GPL community" benefit, and those who do not wish to be part of the GPL community do not benefit. In fact, the govt is funding their competition.
2. If the federal govt was developing modifications to TrustedNT or Trusted Solaris, and giving them to the respective companies, the GPL bigots on this board would be going berzerk. Their acceptance of the government's development of SE Linux just shows how quickly some conservatives will abandon their limited government principles at the thought of some pork/welfare spending going their way.
Not inconsistent at all, nor welfare. Government is simply complying with the copyright conditions of the GPL---after all, government is bound by copyright law just as all of us are. The government is still free to classify and keep secret under the GPL, or develop a code base from scratch outside the GPL limitations (and I agree with you that any such code DEVELOPED FROM SCRATCH should be public domain).
I'm not arguing that the govt should violate anyone's coypright... But you seem to have skipped a step. You've skipped right over the part where we should ask ourselves, "Why is our government developing operating system code in the first place?"
SE Linux is no different than "Airbus Linux".
See their website http://www.nsa.gov/selinux/ for THEIR justification. Not being privy to the decision-making process at the NSA, I have to assume they have some idea as to why it is desirable.
So what? The only rights are individual rights. Corporate rights are a fiction of judicial activism in the same vein as the "constitutional right to an abortion under the 4th amendment." I happen to be pro-choice, but let's call a spade a spade, neither exist in our constitution.
In fact, the govt is funding their competition.
The government is funding the opposition to the GPL-friendly companies when it pays for additional features in proprietary software. This is even worse, the public gets nothing out of that because the modifications are closed. Why should anyone ever have to pay taxes to support modifications to a commerical product that they'll not get for free? I'm a taxpayer and so are you, why should we not get the features that our tax dollars put into proprietary software for free?
If the federal govt was developing modifications to TrustedNT or Trusted Solaris, and giving them to the respective companies, the GPL bigots on this board would be going berzerk
And with good reason, no one should ever have to pay taxes to support commercial products that they don't get for free. That is corporate welfare. It is one thing to fund a proprietary OS for our military vehicles, it is another to fund modifications to commericial software like Solaris and Windows.
Their acceptance of the government's development of SE Linux just shows how quickly some conservatives will abandon their limited government principles at the thought of some pork/welfare spending going their way.
So the government should never be able to pay to have software tailored for its specific needs? I would rather the code be under the BSD license, but the GPL is not that bad. You want to talk pork/welfare, talk about the Army buying nearly $500M worth of MS software at near full retail cost.
"Why is our government developing operating system code in the first place?"
It isn't, it is customizing an existing product that is free and open to the public for its own needs. Does it ever occur to the critics of SELinux that the NSA may have the right idea? The government cannot control the quality of Solaris, HPUX, QNX and WindowsNT. It can control the quality of its internal versions of Linux and BSD.