Navy’s ship cancelation a blow for real-time Linux, IBM

The U.S. Navy’s cancelation of its $20 billion Zumwalt destroyer contract last week because of a 50% price hike is disappointing for the Linux community and surely must be for IBM The Armonk, N.Y.-based computer company designed the innovative centralized computing systems that runs all shipboard operations from battle systems to navigation and business applications and developed Java-based, real-time capabilities for the Linux kernel specifically for the project.

The latter is essential to ensure that battle systems, for example,...