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NASA Releases Classic Software To Public Domain
xpccx writes in with a bit from NewsBytes, "NASA turned 43 this month and marked the occasion by releasing more than 200 of its scientific and engineering applications for public use. The modular Fortran programs can be modified, compiled and run on most Linux platforms." The software can be found at OpenChannelSoftware.com.
At long last I am ready to prepare my own space mission. I wonder if a whiskey barrel is gonna be air tight after I launch it/me into space with a trebuchet. (It's this sort of unconventional thinking that should get me my job at NASA. Or at least get me put to sleep).
Next they'll be buying NASA.com - my mate is a support geezer and got his manager ringing him saying 'I want to see the mars landings but www.nasa.com has just got breasts all over the place' - oh how we laughed...
To port this to FORTRAN.Net!
I mean, uh. Well. It is pretty nifty: I'm always interested to take a look at old programs and see what dirty tricks old-school programmers used to cram as much code as they could into the tiny amount of space that they had to work with.
Lunar Lander, please?
Easy does it!
This comment has been submitted already, 276865 hours , 59 minutes ago. No need to try again.
Are there other examples of NASA released code?
I'll get to see the code for that annoying Pop Under Ad; X10 Camera.
Only an evil Gov't conspiracy can be to blame for such a thing!
You know like the way NASA monitors what cable channels you watch with the "cable box"... Oh come'on you _do_ know about that don't you?
This
Newspeak
-oZZ www.act6.org
...a new discovery in the cause of the Apollo 13's malfunction was made when someone noticed hacked code with the comment "3y3 0WnZ j00, N@5@"
If CmdrTaco gets put to sleep, can I have his ID?
I didn't think NASA did that type of thing, I thought Vets did that...so that what they're doing to supplement their budget...Yeah!!!
Sean D.
"Hmm. I am to metaphor cheese as metaphor cheese is to transitive verb crackers!"
Succumbs to the slashdot effect. I got far enough to find something interesting and it crapped out. I mean, defecated externally. 'Crap' is double ungood. . .
You are not the customer.
The NASA code used on space missions is some of the most throughly debugged anywhere. Can't afford a blue screen of death when lives are actually on the line. Also, you have to be pretty fault tolerant in case cosmic rays or other external phenomena are messing with your data.
Of course the drawback is that most NASA code is too specialized to be of general interest.
It will be interesting to see if the "many-eyes" effect of free software turns up bugs in these programs that have been used for years.
As someone who does scientific programming in FORTRAN and even MORTRAN. I will love to pour through old math routines.
Tax payers paid for this and now we get to use it. Gotta like when the system works for you not against you.
By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more. - Albert Camus
So, when are the NSA going to release theyre code :)
Is the NASA code stuff that went throught the CMM level 5 process?
----- Whats wrong with this picture? http://www.revoh.org:1234/whatswrong
fortran, cause you can send it by email which is pretty hard to do with anthrax.
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
... to convert all measurements (and I do mean ALL) to metric!! They missed a few of those...
Karma: Professionally Doomed (mostly affected by inability to keep opinions to self)
Hey, if they award you the X-Prize posthumously, be sure to leave at least part of the money to the Free Software Foundation, or some such .org.
if ($it != $onething) {$it = $another;}
after I launch it/me into space with a trebuchet
Thanks to memepool's links, you can Buy a nice trebuchet for only $89 !!!
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Make sure you check the metric to English unit conversions before you use the sofware for anything important.
I think I'll stop here.
The name FORTRAN scares me. FORmula TRANslator. Good god...that's the coder's equivalent to Beezlebub. Or was that COBOL? Oh well...back to attempting to fit my head into a goldfish bowl. Mars or bust!
Of course we torture people, we need the information --Gen. Pinochet
What the heck is that?
I thought the Senators for MPAA and RIAA outlawed that *years* ago.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
I'd love to look at their stuff, but it has been years since I "spoke" Fortran fluently, having moved most of my old stuff to C or C++. Are there any converters out there that are up to snuff for this kind of work?
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
readme.txt
==========
To run this code, you will need the following:
* a Fortran compiler
* a space shuttle
--riney
Those who haven't read it yet should read this link where Ron L. Toms launches people with a trebuchet. (You can also find him jumping the grand canyon if you look around.)
(Score yourself two bonus points if you remember this show.)
Less Talk, More Beer.
Shouldn't the software used by NASA, a public institution, already be in the public domain, by definition?
Apparently information also wants to eat dinner...
Gawd, information can be sooo demanding!
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
By chance, does anyone have a mirror of this site? It's completely slammed. I got less than 10 bytes before it timed out.
Only if it is written by civil servants. Most NASA software is written by contractors.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Yeah - sickening that they never said anything about it. Not as if there was a feature article on it or anything.
Last post!
welp, you would have the highest acceleration at the beginning, and if you wanted to get into orbit, that acceleration would need to be so high, that you would become meat-and-bone pulp on the bottom of that barrel... provided that the barrel itself will survive.
Therefore, I encourage you to try, maybe you won't get the job at NASA, but at least you will succeed SPAMming the outer space!
Sigged!
This is pretty cool.
I know a lot of these codes are relatively old and not that glamorous (lot of simulation, thermodynamics etc.) but the science behind them hasn't changed dramatically - energy is still conserved in fortran or C++ right?
For those of us that are writing scientific code it's nice to be able to reuse bits here and there and to see how somebody else tackled a similar problem.
Just browsing around I see quite a few codes that I used in classes for homework and projects (provided at the time by the instructor). Mechanical Engineers still like fortran (when it's spelled in lower case).
I am president of Open Channel Software. Most of the NASA software we are listing have a fee associated with the software, imposed on us by NASA and an organization called NTTC. We are trying to 'open' the process, at minimum, pushing for free downloads for private individuals. We are also trying to get community activity going around some of the more popular programs.
Most of the software developed for NASA projects these days is open -- at least, the scientific operations and data analysis software. For example, check out the solarsoft distribution of solar physics analysis software, including planning tools for most existing solar instruments. CVS and Sourceforge it ain't -- but you can get your hands on the actual software that is being used in the SOHO, TRACE, Yohkoh, and HESSI missions (and soon STEREO and Solar-B too).
Like oh, say, Slashdot.ORG
> I wonder if a whiskey barrel is gonna be air tight
The severity of this problem depends on the method used to drain the whisky barrel.
Hic
<-- You are here.
I used to work for a conttractor for NASA and did quite a bit of maintenance and development for some of the applications in this library. They are written in FORTRAN mostly because the original development took place in the early 70s for most of them. When I got there 20 years later, I was maintaining spaghetti code that had been modified and remodified ad nauseam.
I recieved a couple letters informing me that "my" code had been incorporated into the COSMIC library. At that time, it was mostly research and academic organizations that used COSMIC. Anyway, it wasn't really my code. I was just the person currently modifying it.
Also, much of the code is not real-time. Sustantial time is spent doing simulations to make sure everything is everything. It's an expensive mistake to fix once you've launched. Nonetheless, I had to sit around during launches (always at 3 am) just in case... I saw a post earlier that talked about the rigorous testing, and that was certainly true which led to me doing pretty much nothing during the launch and checkout of the spacecraft. It was kind of neat to watch it all, though...
The revolution will be televised. Blackout restrictions apply.
Just my thought on this. It's the people like you that are causing the terrorism to win. What was the reason everyone says was behind this attack? It's because the terrorist hate america, the way we do things, our way of life. So by not going about life the way you normally do, not playing some video games and caring what software contributions nasa does, you are doing exactly what they want. That's what they want to happen, for America to no longer be free, no long be caught up in all of this stuff, but without it, we wouldn't be where we are right now. Without this way of life there would be no PS2, there would be no PC's there would be no /., and you wouldn't have half the knowledge you do. So to all of you people saying we're not doing things right, because we're not in tears every day... I say you are causing the problem.
Later
What a different world it would be if all tax $ funded software were available like this.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
By Musan S
WASHINGTON, D.C., U.S.A.,
25 Oct 2001, 11:47 AM CST
Kenme, Government Office of Strange Rumors. NASA turned 43 this month and marked the occasion by releasing more than 200 of its scientific and engineering appliances for use on BattleBots, the robot fighting show on Comedy Central. The outer space-ready booster rockets, thermal shielding equipment and gyroscopes can be modified and pitted against each other or most exisitng BattleBots such as Son of Whyachi and BioHazard. The Robert C. Byrd National Technology Transfer Center in Wheeling, W.Va., and BattleBots Inc., a for-profit scrap metal producer, are collecting the "NASA Classics" collection of new BattleBots based on discarded NASA equipment.
The Byrd center has distributed more than 50 NASA technology-based BattleBots created by NASA engineers, said the center's president, Joseph Allen, in a statement. BattleBots now has access to NASA tech and "will help NASA promote the use of Cosmic Ray Shielding, Reagan-era Star Wars laser technology, and Hydrazine-based propellants for the television viewing public's benefit," Allen said.
The classic tech, waiting to be annhilated for over 30 years in showers of sparks and smoke on cable television, served a variety of purposes at NASA. None of which is as interesting as what the twisted minds behind past BattleBots envision. Said Robert Everhart, creator of Atomic Wedgie, "Those NASA engineers are some scary folks. Atomic Wedgie can withstand most onslaughts, such as Diesector's Pick Axe or Minion's Fireman's emergency saw, but a 300 terawatt neodymium laser? Forget about it." Details are sketchy, but one NASA engineer with a giant smirk on his face who spoke on conditions of anonymity identified three NASA tech BattleBots in the works: the "Apollo Lunar Launcher", the "Viking Mission to Hell", and the "Rubble Telescope".
Reported by Bewsnytes.com.
11:47 CST
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
This is a great gift from NASA. I can imagine FEA and finite difference packages for thermal, stress and rad flux. Other languages can be used to devolop graphical front ends where that is useful. Sooooo cool.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
"Friday, October 26, 2001
:-P
We would like to apologize to visitors from Slashdot, along with the rest of our community, for the problems we have experienced with our server this morning. We are in the process of upgrading our server to accommodate the spike in requests. We thank everyone for both their interest, and their patience.
For those interested in downloading code from the NASA Classics Collection, you should be aware that we are currently required to charge a fee for the software. We are working with the people from NASA to try to "open" this software to enable downloads without fees, at least for private, non-commercial use."
Sounds like something associated with the U.S. government eh??
So, why isn't all (non-classified) government software open-source? Haven't we already paid for it? Why is NASA the exception?
It seems to me that state governments in particular could drastically reduce software developement costs by reusing code already built by other states.
Red Hat, certainly. Probably it's easier to make a list of GNU/Linux distributions that don't come with a Fortran compiler, given that:
The GNU Fortran compiler (g77) is a component of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC).
A free Fortran-to-C convertor tool (f2c), including run-time libraries, is available from netlib, and has been included on some distributions since before g77 was released to the public.
If the Fortran code released by NASA sticks to the FORTRAN 77 standard, it'll likely work "out of the box" on Linux distributions.
(Note that, while installing a distribution like Red Hat, you might have to explicitly select g77 to get it installed...it's not so small that it can be installed without checking with the admin doing the install, I guess.)
Practice random senselessness and act kind of beautiful.
I very much doubt they said that. They probably said "it's useless for our purposes" or something like that. (In my experience, people who use Fortran for modeling fluid flows aren't so foolish as to generalize from their very narrow personal experience to the entire potential usability of a thing.)
Buggy: not terribly, but it had (and probably still has) a few annoying, well-documented bugs that have proven difficult to fix.
Not standards compliant: if the standard is ANSI FORTRAN 77, that isn't the problem.
What your colleagues might be running into is most likely one of two things, or both: g77 doesn't support some widespread extensions to FORTRAN 77, like Cray pointers; and g77 hasn't, at least until recently, provided sufficient info for the debugger to use to allow a programmer to see things like variables in COMMON or EQUIVALENCE.
Less likely, but not improbably, they're frustrated by other annoyances, like poor performance or even inadequate diagnostics in certain cases. As with most any compiler, performance might be quite good for most users, but terrible, compared to a usable alternative, for some. g77 depends pretty much entirely on the GCC back end plus the f2c run-time libraries (libf2c) to achieve performance, though the g77 front end necessarily makes some "choices" among components of these other chunks of software to try to arrange for the best performance for most uses.
Or maybe they've just converted wholesale to Fortran 90 or beyond, in which case g77 will indeed be useless to them -- clearly not a fault of g77 itself!
Note that I'm considered the original author of g77, though I stopped working on it a couple of years ago. I made many mistakes in my original design and implementation of g77; only a few of these were truly problematic in the long run, but they remain as obstacles to many who've thought they could come in and "fix" certain of g77's problems by exerting a substantive combination of effort and imagination.
There is now a GNU Fortran 95 project underway, which, if your colleagues contribute to in some fashion, might better meet their needs. I'm not sure, but I think they started by ignoring pretty much all the g77-specific code in GCC: probably a wise move.
Practice random senselessness and act kind of beautiful.
Cool, I open /. and see NASA software. Click on the link wait for it to load, watching TV while waiting...
After a few seconds I look and the first think I see on the right is, "Crack Growth and Fatigue Analysis"
What does this have to do with uh software, nasa, umm computers?
hmm... for fun I enjoy launching DDoS attacks against 127.87.42.5
We would like to apologize to visitors from Slashdot, along with the rest of our community, for the problems we have experienced with our server this morning. We are in the process of upgrading our server to accommodate the spike in requests. We thank everyone for both their interest, and their patience. For those interested in downloading code from the NASA Classics Collection, you should be aware that we are currently required to charge a fee for the software. We are working with the people from NASA to try to "open" this software to enable downloads without fees, at least for private, non-commercial use.
Just so I don't troll too terribly
Probably the most famous application they are releasing is the NASTRAN (NASa STRuctural ANalysis) System which most of us aerospace types are already using in the industry. They also released some composite and general structural design tools.
They also release numerous 2D and 3D aero flow tools.
The one that caught my eye: SCRAM - An Engineer's Tool for Prediction of Airframe Integrated Scramjet Performance.
The one-I-expected-to-be-there-but-wasn't: Planetary, interplanetary, and/or Mars multiple degree of freedom dynamic simulations. They gotta have a few of those, but apparently none were released.
Religion and science are both 90% crap..but that doesn't negate the other 10%.
OpenChannel Software is SELLING copies of these programs. Don't expect any of them to be free or even cheap.
One projects i was looking at (a compression algorithm comparision program) was about $154 for source.
Sounds like another backroom deal where things get put in the public domain, but one company get control of it.
Blech. And people wonder why no one trusts the government...
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
Unix source docs: $250
DEC Alpha AXP executable use: $2000 / year
HP9000 HP-UX executable use: $2000 / year
IBM RS/6000 executable use: $2000 / year
DOS/Win3.1/95 executable use: $1000 / year
Sun Solaris 2.x executable use: $2000 / year
DEC ALPHA OSF/1 source access: $7000 / year
SGI IRIX 5.x source access: $7000 / year
Sun Solaris 2.x source access: $7000 / year
Be nice when this code IS actually open source.
I wonder how many patents NASA violated with this code.
Larry Mills-Gahl
Open Channel Software
See this NTTC press release on this article.
The biggest trick the devil pulled was letting lawyers become politicians so they can write the laws.
I apologize to all of you who wanted to visit the NASA software but were unable because of the spike in requests. We've upgraded the service and are now handling the load so please come back and see what the NASA COSMIC software announcement is all about .
Larry Mills-Gahl
Open Channel Software
I apologize to those whose requests were not served this morning due to the spike in demand. We've upgraded our service now and we invite you back to check out the NASA software.
Larry Mills-Gahl
Open Channel Software
This is funny--nothing to do with here, and you didn't reference the source:
www.theonion.com
who would hang you by your snarklies if you weren't such a coward.
/.
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
M0571y H@rml355.
Raytheon TDU-850 Printer Driver for Windows
Sweet, I'd been waiting for that one for a long time...
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
Why does most media always associate open source with Linux? There are other open source operating systems (ex. *BSD, AtheOS, and GNU HURD)?
A real life BSD zealot.
So I visited the site to look at their AI offerings, and the first interesting package I saw, AUTOCLASS III, costs $900 to download. If that's your idea of public domain, I'll just keep hoping we encounter alien life that uses the GPL.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Under U.S. copyright law, works of the Federal government are not copyrightable; these programs were "public domain" the moment they were created (unless they were created by government contractors who were NOT working on a "work-for-hire" basis).
But it's real nice that they're now publicly accessible...
I went to the site. There isn't a whole lot in the public domain. Open Channel Software charges money for the application and more money for the source code.
I'm not going to pay $100 for the source code to a line of code counter.
From what I can tell this software is:
a - available if you pay for it only (I'm sure they call this a distribution fee, but why no free download?)
and
b - only available *to* *US* *citizens*
Both of these are fair enough, the US paid for the software (via government funding of NASA) and they cann't be forced to give it away, but this is *not* public domain software, it is simply put in a more public place.
A lot of this software has always been available, so long as you knew who to ask, and would pay the fee for distribution, and were a US citizen, and signed the agreements, etc, etc, so not much has changed I guess.
Of course everyone knows that us in the non-US part of the world are still dragging our knuckles on the ground and trying to work out what to use fire for, but we still seem to find uses for this kind of software, believe it or not. I know, I use Overture from LANL for flow solving, it's MUCH more open source, and more free, and (to be honest) better than anything NASA has yet made available in this area.
Phooey. I clicked on "Get NASTRAN," and found that JUST THE DOC SET is $250. An IBM PC executable is $1000 PER YEAR. And the source code is $7000 PER YEAR.
I'm not sure what kind of "public domain" this is, but it's certainly not what I expected.
NASTRAN Doc-Full Set NASTRAN Documentation set for the UNIX version of the source code. Includes the four volume set of documentation on CD-ROM: User's Manual, Theoretical Manual, Programmer's Manual and Demonstration Problem Manual. $250.00
NASTRAN Doc-Full Set w/ Code NASTRAN Documentation set for the UNIX version of the source code. Includes the four volume set of documentation on CD-ROM.
Select this option if you are ordering documentation in conjuction with purchasing NASTRAN source code. $0.00
NASTRAN Exec. DEC ALPHA OSF/1 Executable version of NASTRAN for DEC Alpha AXP computers running OSF/1. This is an annual fee. (COS-10067) $2,000.00
NASTRAN Exec. HP9000 Executable version of NASTRAN for HP9000 series 7xx/8xx computers running HP-UX. This is an annual fee. (COS-10054) $2,000.00
NASTRAN Exec. IBM RS/6000 Executable version of NASTRAN for IBM RS/6000 computers running AIX. This is an annual fee. (COS-10061) $2,000.00
NASTRAN Exec. IBM/PC Executable version of NASTRAN for IBM PC compatible computers running MS-DOS, Windows 3.1, or Windows 95. This is an annual fee. (COS-10080) $1,000.00
NASTRAN Exec. Sun Solaris Executable version of NASTRAN for Sun Solaris 2.X. This is an annual fee. (COS-10065) $2,000.00
NASTRAN Source DEC ALPHA OSF/1 Source code for NASTRAN for DEC ALPHA OSF/1. This is an annual fee. (COS-10066) $7,000.00
NASTRAN Source SGI IRIX Source code for NASTRAN for SGI IRIS computers running IRIX 5.x. This is an annual fee. (COS-10057) $7,000.00
NASTRAN Source Sun Solaris Source code for NASTRAN for Sun Solaris 2.X. This is an annual fee. (COS-10064) $7,000.00
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
MWSG, more whining slashdot geeks. Those free for non-commercial use contracts people use are ridiculous because you all know damn well that it is rare that anyone who uses that software in a corporate fashion pays for the stuff. How many of you have "free for educational or non-commercial use" software on your PCs at work? I bet a good number of you do. If you just want the code to play around with you can find a number of CFD Fortran programs all over the internet. The cost of binaries for these toys is about what you'll pay for FLUENT anyhow. Funny how the same people that complain about NASA messing up mission or needing more money are the same ones bitching that they dare charge money for something they worked on.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
www.netlib.org has more useful public domain scientific software than any other site on the planet.
Wroot
people are carping and whining that the software wasn't released under the GNU license
It wasn't released under any "public license" at all, as far as I can see. According to the site, if you want to download it you have to pay a fee.
Sounds like a "commercial software venture" to me, not really Slashdot-newsworthy. Just somebody (NASA and these open-whatzit guys) cashing in on some old code.
Not public domain, not "free" for anyone.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
What they use
Since I'm using an A2000!
Regards,
JK
(David Bowman, EVA near HUGE Monolithic Win-PC in orbit around Jupiter) "My God - its full of Malware!"