Originally Posted by
t43562
Taking on the software is no joke but Huawei bought the source code of my former company some years ago and ..... surprise...... it looks like it was a smart move for them. Maintaining it is similar to any other effort - you have to train people and they have to practice doing it. It's not free of course but it can be done. At the very least you can work out what's going on when you have some problem by reading the code and should you need to reverse engineer it you start from a position where its potentially better than designing a new aircraft.
Most importantly though, if you feel that is all paranoia, you get to fix the bugs that matter to you - that your allies look like they aren't getting around to yet.
Interesting that you think your Huawei example is even remotely comparable to a combat aircraft like the F35. What did they buy the rights too, a Switch, Router or some such piece of comm’s kit that probably gets sold by the thousands or even tens of thousands. Kind of makes it more worthwhile to produce everything else needed to make something viable. And this is a Chinese company we are talking about with a long history of reverse engineering (stealing) the IPR of other companies, organisations, nations.
Now think about maintaining F35 software. And by maintaining I mean fixing, adapting, modifying etc. So, the source code, requirements and design documentation are needed. Then we need to understand it all. Then we need the development and test environment, including all the test harnesses and systems to simulate or emulate all of the interfaces, in genuine real time. Then we will need some sort of test rig to test the software in as close to its intended environment as possible. Finally, it will be tested on the real thing, the F35.
Then we will need to ensure that all of our documentation is kept up to date. We will need to do all of this every time we make a change. We will need to do it for everything our software interfaces with, eg weapons, kit we have no knowledge of – eg genuine black boxes – we may get the interface spec. Also everything external to the aircraft that we interface with to remain interoperable.
We have a long history of being able to do this. We did it to an extent for F3, GR1/4, Jag, MR2, R1, GR/3/5/7/9. We also have a long history of ******* it up.
Oh yes, and would we really do this for our fleet of 48 or so aircraft, whatever we end up with, and render our fleet non-interoperable and divergent from everyone else’s development?