German Rheinmetall open-sources its Battlesuite connected weapon system protcol

	German Rheinmetall open-sources its Battlesuite connected weapon system protcol(rheinmetall.github.io)
	227 points by summarity 13 hours ago \| 79 comments
	tl;dr: Rheinmetall has open-sourced onboardapi, a middleware library for standardized communication between sensors and software in its Battlesuite connected weapon system. Built on the ddkit SDK and using the OMG's Data Distribution Service (DDS) standard with XTypes/XCDR2 encoding for backward compatibility, it provides a C++ core with wrappers for Java, C#/.NET, and Python. Interface descriptions are released under EPL v2.0, while runtime libraries remain under a proprietary EULA.
	HN Discussion: ↓Criticism of the implementation quality, particularly the language wrappers and naming conventions ↓Skepticism about DDS as the underlying protocol choice for this use case ↓Ethical concerns about open-sourcing weapons-related APIs •Comparisons to existing similar standards like TMS, OMS, DIS/HLA suggesting this is reinventing the wheel ↑Speculation on pragmatic motivations (avoiding legal/export hassles) or benefits of transparency over obscurity