Yes, it's just about working with people who are doing things of interest to the Army. Army leaders have been saying for a while that, without partnerships, there are areas in which the Army can't keep up with the pace of technological change, the spread of new technologies, and what people who haven't historically had access to military R&D can do with those technologies. For example, mines used to be limited to a relatively few armies. Then somebody figured out how to set off stacks of stolen explosives with a cell phone and we had to deal with IEDs.
Also, my command executes about 75% of the Army's R&D budget and does a fair amount of engineering for Army and other federal organizations. All that totals up to about $6 - 6.5 billion a year. That's a lot of money, but not enough to keep up with everybody everywhere in every field of interest to the Army. So we partner.
As far as exclusive vs non-exclusive, there has long been a segment of the military industrial complex that takes Army research and builds things to sell to the Army (and we have programs to help them do that), or to turn the research into civilian products. It goes project by project, so I don't make blanket statements. That said, the open campus idea that was pitched to by the lab to our commander is pretty much exactly what it says in their press releases. My general understanding is that people like military contracts, but if you restrict them to a military contract then the people with some of the best ideas lose interest. Again, that's just my understanding because I'm sometimes in the room for various discussions. If this were an official query I'd have to check with several people to give an official, informed reply.
I work one level up from the lab, but they probably wouldn't tell me either because I don't have a need to know. That said, if there are classified angles to something I at least usually know what to avoid bringing up. Nothing like that with this partnership. Our command has more than 500 formal partnerships, and this deals with one of the Army's top modernization priorities (future vertical lift).
> The US defense collaboration we can only speculate on
Or you could ask. I work for the lab's parent command. The easy answer is that, if you look at the Army's top modernization priorities, future vertical lift (better helicopters) is right near the tippy top. And if you search up "ARL open campus," you'll see what the lab has been up to with respect to partnering. And that's just the lab. We have six research, development & engineering centers who are also partnering with people all the time.
I've never talked with the ARL PAO folks about open source, but in general you're right. They have several writers who have to cover everything ARL does (that they can talk about). So they're like most civilian reporters: generalists who talk to experts to learn enough about an event or subject to write a report for an audience that knows less -- or nothing -- about the subject.
Full disclosure: I work in the PAO at RDECOM, of which ARL is a part.
Well, somebody has to go the other way. If you haven't looked at Slackware lately, give it a shot. The advances in the kernel and KDE and XFCE make it a really nice environment now. Yes, it still has an ncurses installer, and yes, it still boots (at least the first time) to a command prompt. But the installer really is easy, and it takes changing one number in one file to boot to a log-in screen.
Once you're in your desktop environment, the biggest difference you'll see is that Slackware is more responsive and more stable. KDE 4.4 in particular has the non-technical user covered. XFCE is easy too, but you might want to add some packages (which Robby Workman always seems to compile and have available on his site). Oh, and you should install WICD from the extra folder on the DVD if you use wireless.
Slackware also has slackpkg in by default now. You have to do it at the command line, but it updates the official packages with two simple commands.
Updating to a new release is still not as easy as a lot of other distros, but that's one of the bullets that most probably should bite and reinstall from scratch once a year or so. And if you don't want to I'm sure a Slackware install will continue working at least as long as the Ubuntu LTS version.
The thing is, Slackware still gives you vanilla packages, but the advances throughout the system have made vanilla a whole lot richer.
Also, my command executes about 75% of the Army's R&D budget and does a fair amount of engineering for Army and other federal organizations. All that totals up to about $6 - 6.5 billion a year. That's a lot of money, but not enough to keep up with everybody everywhere in every field of interest to the Army. So we partner.
As far as exclusive vs non-exclusive, there has long been a segment of the military industrial complex that takes Army research and builds things to sell to the Army (and we have programs to help them do that), or to turn the research into civilian products. It goes project by project, so I don't make blanket statements. That said, the open campus idea that was pitched to by the lab to our commander is pretty much exactly what it says in their press releases. My general understanding is that people like military contracts, but if you restrict them to a military contract then the people with some of the best ideas lose interest. Again, that's just my understanding because I'm sometimes in the room for various discussions. If this were an official query I'd have to check with several people to give an official, informed reply.