Ukraine used ArduPilot to help it wipe out Russian targets. It wasn’t the first time and it won’t be the last.

Ukraine used ArduPilot to help it wipe out Russian targets. It wasn’t the first time and it won’t be the last.

Open source software used by hobbyist drones powered an attack that wiped out a third of Russia’s strategic long range bombers on Sunday afternoon, in one of the most daring and technically coordinated attacks in the war.

In broad daylight on Sunday, explosions rocked air bases in Belaya, Olenya, and Ivanovo in Russia, which are hundreds of miles from Ukraine. The Security Services of Ukraine’s (SBU) Operation Spider Web was a coordinated assault on Russian targets it claimed was more than a year in the making, which was carried out using a nearly 20-year-old piece of open source drone autopilot software called ArduPilot.

ArduPilot’s original creators were in awe of the attack. “That’s ArduPilot, launched from my basement 18 years ago. Crazy,” Chris Anderson said in a comment on LinkedIn below footage of the attack.

  • unalivejoy@lemm.eeEnglish
    152·
    4 days ago

    When open source software has its use limited for war, it stops being open source.

    • trevor (he/they)@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      84·
      4 days ago

      Eh. I don’t really care what the OSI a handful of tech giants in a trenchcoat have to say about the ethics of my licenses.

      If someone wants to allow modification, distribution, and usage of your software, in the spirit of open source, but don’t want it to be used by organizations that bomb children, I’d consider that better than an Open Source™️ license.

      • LandedGentry@lemmy.zipEnglish
        12·
        4 days ago

        I completely agree however in a situation like this, the only solution would be to never have any open source software for drones. You can put that limited license on your software, but come on, do you think a warring nation is going to concern themselves with that? The only solution is to not have open source software for things that can even be remotely used like this

        If I were Ukraine I sure as shit wouldn’t care what license you have on it. If it’s available and I can easily use it without consequence, I would use it.

      • Saleh@feddit.org
        4·
        3 days ago

        Yeah, i don’t think any military will care about what restrictions you put in your license anyway. What are you going to do about it? Sue them?

        • rumba@lemmy.zipEnglish
          3·
          3 days ago

          Yeah, sadly they’ll just use it. Or they’ll pay a contractor who uses it and claims that they made it themselves.

          • Saleh@feddit.org
            1·
            3 days ago

            If you create a technology and make it publicly available you need to consider the possible uses and misuses. Misusers wont be held back by a license limitation. That is a simple fact of life.

            • trevor (he/they)@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
              1·
              3 days ago

              Adopting that attitude toward anything is pretty self-defeating. It’s the same bad argument used against gun regulations in the US: “only misusers will have guns”.

              Whether you agree with more or less regulations on anything, the “misusers will just do it anyway” is a bad argument.

      • grue@lemmy.world
        3·
        3 days ago

        The FSF is very much the opposite of “a handful of tech giants in a trenchcoat,” yet they take the same position.