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.
Considering the fact that Putin has arguably legitimate concerns over NATO pushing eastward, as well as the fact that there are major neo-Nazi problems in Ukraine, and the fact that Crimea did not belong to Ukraine initially, this isn’t a one-sided conflict. I’m not saying Putin’s a good guy by any means, but I’m also not going to fall in line with a narrative that is literally designed to launder money for scumbags like Zelenskyy and those aforementioned neo-Nazis while forcing the men of the country into service to die for a war that should never have happened in the first place.
I’m not going to support that narrative. I will not support the idea of other countries getting involved in a conflict that has nothing to do with us. I will not support the idea of forcing completely unrelated individuals into military service to die for a country that has nothing to do with them. I will not support a narrative that pushes us toward World War III. I also do not like idea of free software getting a bad name by aligning with the sLaVa uKrAiNi crowd. Ukraine’s government is no less evil than Putin. It’s bad enough we have so many different free software projects ending up politicized by people who can’t help but to force their stupid political agenda into everything, even if that softwate has nothing to do with politics. Last thing we need is more of that lunacy.