Gene Buckle writes: > I guess my problem is that I'm totally unable to understand why > someone would object to just the _presense_ of munitions code even > being present. It completely baffles me. Even as I sit here > pondering the why, all I can come up with is pejorative commentary > and that's unfortunate.
I should just stay out of this, but let me just say one thing. I don't think the problem is so much the presence of virtual guns and virtual shooting. Most of us have played our share of video games over the years and starting with the Apple ][+ I've blown away more than my share of virtual bad guys. I think the problem is more that FlightGear could (or in a few small cases is/was) being used by companies in conjunction with developing military sims or developing things in support of military sims. Note I'm not saying that flightgear is being used in a full, all out military combat training setting ... I'm not aware of that being true. But as we move forward, the Flightgear structure is just as attractive to companies with military contracts as it is to companies with purely civilian goals. Personally, I don't think there's any way around that. I could be a bread maker and some of that bread could be fed to combat troops fighting for some cause I don't necessarily agree with. Does that mean I stop making bread altogether? The US military found that condoms were immensely useful for keeping sand out of their rifles in Iraq. They sent over truckfulls of condoms. Does that mean we should stop producing condoms? I'm guessing there are probably a lot of opinions on that subject, few having anything to do with the military applications. I think people have to weigh the pros and cons and ultimately make a decision based on their best conscience, and we need to in turn respect that. But FlightGear is open-source and licensed under the terms of the GPL, so anyone who abides by our terms is free to use it. That's part of the nature of a free society I guess. Personally, I think that if a person is opposed to war (which I believe is a reasonable position in most cases) they can probably find a lot more effective things to further there cause besides abandoning FlightGear. And I should say that personally, my focus for FlightGear is accurate, realistic, FAA certifiable civilian training simulators. I'll generally oppose anything that takes away from that, and generally be as flexible as possible for other people to achieve thier various goals within the FlightGear framework. Regards, Curt. -- Curtis Olson HumanFIRST Program FlightGear Project Twin Cities curt 'at' me.umn.edu curt 'at' flightgear.org Minnesota http://www.flightgear.org/~curt http://www.flightgear.org _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
