Its a government contract, cost overruns due to inadequate or changing specifications are to be expected. :-)

If its Linux only don't present it as a successor to TrueCrypt. A very important feature of TrueCrypt is(was) that it targets Linux, Mac OS X and MS Windows. Any archive being available to any of the three platforms.

The successor to TrueCrypt will most likely be something derived from the audited TrueCrypt source code. You just won't compare favorably given the single supported platform. You are just going to create a reputation of being one of the lessor choices, which may be entirely unfair.

Don't handicap yourself. Promote your software on its own merits, don't try to piggyback on TrueCrypts popularity, such a strategy will likely backfire.

You are confusing proprietary with closed, its not closed if you have the source and sometimes the source is available for proprietary code. Consider libraries with binary-only and binary-plus-source licenses. In the later case I've had the source, complete rights to modify and redistribute my modification just like the vendor supplied binary. There was a community and a circle of benefits. Licensees provided fixes to the vendor, the vendor incorporated fixes in the main source, the main source was available to binary-plus-source licensees. It was very much like an open source community. We had the source, the right to modify and use it, our future was in our hands despite the proprietary nature of the library. Its a model that has worked.

What this particular vendor is suggesting seems similar to the binary-plus-source model, the main difference being no charge for the source option. History suggests this can work, it worked when the source option cost extra.

It seems not so much making the software free but making it open to customers. It seems reminiscent of various source licenses I had for various past projects. The vendor offered binary-only and binary-plus-source licenses, fortunately I was able to get management to go for the later. Having the source meant our future was in our hands. I did fix some bugs that we ran in to. One was extremely technical and took a few days to find and fix, reproducibility was extremely low. It was dependent on random memory containing a value that when loaded into an x86 segment register passed verification but led to later permissions violations. It was not something the developers or other customers were running in to, we just got lucky with that random value. For everyone else the random value was failing verification and the erring code path was never executed.

My fixes and the fixes of other customers were incorporated into the vendor's source. We all benefited from the community effort. We had the source and the right to rebuild and link binaries into our projects and redistribute. If we cared to we could have customized things. In practice it was very much like open source efforts for us. Such models work, proprietary with rights to source works.

If Colin Powell had run for President it would have been an issue. That is the detail so many people are missing.

Now consider the additional rules and policies that were implemented after Powell, perhaps inspired by Powell's handling. Now consider the greater common knowledge of hacking, official pentagon and white house servers getting hacked, and no one rethinking of whether a self-administered basement email server is a good idea for the Secretary of State. Legal or not it shows a severe lack of good judgment, which is a very important thing to consider in a Presidential candidate.

I wonder if a 3rd party lib is responsible for any of this, quietly committing the fraud without the app developer's knowledge? Unless those 5,000+ apps are coming from a relatively small number of developers.

I'm actually OK with licensing of operators, something on the order of a 4-hour class covering laws and safety. But I am also confident that the CA legislature will take things far beyond any reasonable point.

Yes, but successful exploitation is a very different story. And such attempts are a bit unlikely when the code is publicly coming from the NSA. Anything coming from them will get extra scrutiny by some.

This is California. One idiot misbehaves and the legislature will pass laws to require licensing of operators, registration of drones, mandatory gps based logging during all flights with such logs preserved and inspectable on demand by a government representative. Failure to provide such logs resulting in a loss of an operating license, fines, etc.

Easily disproven by the robotic missions to mars. The Viking robotic missions from the 1970s landed on Mars, took pictures, analyzed soil chemistry, searched for life. Sound familiar? Yep, much like the current rovers. And yet new generations are pretty damn interested despite the fact that geezers saw similar stuff in their teenage years.

The Apollo landings were also preceded by robotic mission, Surveyor, these tested surface soil and took pictures. Things the astronauts did a much better job at also. Plus the astronauts did some science the robots could not. For example removing the camera off of a surveyor lander they landed their lunar module "next to" and bringing the camera back to analyze how materials stood up to long time exposure on the lunar surface.

We can further disprove your notion with various "action sports". BMX, racing and freestyle, date back to the 1970s. Skateboarding in its more modern freestyle incarnation (vertical walls, tricks, etc), 70s. Snowboarding, 70s. Surfing in its more modern shortboard incarnations, 60s. Kids seem to enjoy some things their parents and grandparents also enjoyed.

A base would offer something quite different than a three hour exploration of the surface. I think the Mars rovers demonstrate a continued interest in space exploration. However seeing a person on another celestial body offers something to aspire to be, unlike a robot. Take a survey of the scientists and engineers on those robotics teams and see how many had wanted to be an astronaut when they were very young and being first introduced to math and science.

The kernel is heavily viewed, studied, etc. Its changes are reviewed, at multiple levels in a hierarchy. Its probably the one part of Linux where the many eyeballs notion is reality rather than myth.

Earth orbit is not as inspiring as a person standing on another celestial body. Yes robotic missions are inspiring, but nothing compared to a manned mission. Speaking as someone starting elementary school immediately after Apollo 11.

The Curiosity rover project cost 2.5B, 25% as much as the proposed project.

A human with some tools can do a lot of science. And repair equipment, and deal with unforeseen things, and deal with things in real time, etc. How many rock and soil samples have robots brought back? Robots are not more capable, they are merely on site for longer periods of time.

Robots are a great tool, but they are plan B, a concession to costs or technological limits. And for Mars that concession seems a necessity at the moment. But if a moon mission with a little more endurance than previous missions can be done for $10B -- 4x Curiosity, 2/3x an Apollo mission, and possibly less than the mostly failed STEM encouraging projects the Congress will devise -- its probably worthwhile. Apollo probably eventually paid off in terms dual use tech and basic research. It spurred many technological developments.

Actually we do know, we have the source code, have had it for about 15 years. Its been in the mainline Linux kernel for about 12 years. In case you haven't heard changes to the kernel get, uh, ... reviewed.

Wrong. It would be one of the most effective ways to inspire interest in kids of STEM. Far more than $10B will be flushed down STEM oriented programs for kids that are far less effective.

Not to mention the technological spinoffs that will benefit people. Clue: You are greatly benefiting from the original space race as you are reading this.