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NASA Report Advocates Switch to Open Source
vortimax writes "A new technical report from the NASA Ames Research Center advocates the adoption of Open Source Software internally by NASA for some projects. The paper also proposes modifications to NASA's "external software release" policies to allow OSS and proposes the use of the Mozilla Public License as the license of choice for NASA software."
Will it help their aim at Mars?
Open source has fewer bugs, right?
Can someone give a short plain English summary of the differences between the Mozilla license and the most popular ones (GPL, LGPL, BSD)? I am afraid diff'ing the legalese is not my strong suit.
It's good to see this kinda thing start to happen. I feel that space exploration is humanity's job as a whole. What a great way to promote all humanity contributing to the space exploration effort than by contributing source code. Granted, I know this doesn't mean it's all gonna be done open source-like, but hey, it's still cool and in a way, allows everyone to participate.
ikeya
---- Move SIG...For great justice!
Just make sure that all of your coders are using the same measurment system.
Given that the Thai finance minister had to be rescued from his BMW with sledgehammers after his WinCE powered iDrive computer crashed, methinks I would prefer to fly on open source software.
My rights don't need management.
Remember the article yesterday.
Tor
double Feet2Meters(double feet)
{
return feet * 0.3048;
}
...is it "GNASA" now?
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
.. maybe it's all that highly customised flight software, after all how many people have got spacecraft they need to control.
given their resources NASA can make a great contribution to the open source world as they transform away from a government agency.
version 0.0002
If I am crunching shuttle code at home, how do I test it? Wouldn't be a security problem to publically report the hooks and calls to write such code?
Of course, NASA does office stuff, networking, etc... I guess "some projects" would have to be highly specific. But if you are gonna help NASA, who wants to help the secretary? I wanna help the shuttle fliers get in on the P2P action... (heck, pinging the shuttle would probably be faster than pinging some of the servers I've been using lately.)
Davak
Sorry if this is a repost - Slashdot ate my first one.
I thought the government couldn't copywrite anything. Or does NASA not count?
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
damn! I think you've found the next big category for spam!
Is there some page which compares all the licenses in some table, or in english language terms?
Something like: the Creative Commons explains for their licenses would be very helpful for comparing: MIT X11, BSD, GPL, LGPL, BSD, OSL, Mozilla PL, Apple PL, etc...
If this does not exist, the community would benefit from it!
jabber: johnynek@jabber.org
well i still trust NASA to continue the greatest space program in the world even though they screw up now and then and need continous improvement. don't slam them too hard, their successes far outweigh their failures.
version 0.0002
This is a remarkably balanced report for a government. It advocates a mix of internally developed and external software, including both open source and proprietary software, depending upon the situation.
You'd think this was a pretty obvious take, but far too often government processes are hijacked by either open source zealots or commercial interests. Leaning in either direction can cause great technical difficulty and cost to the public.
Keep in mind that NASA has no great software policy, but a huge amoung of software in place. A policy to ensure consistency and fairness over much of the existing software uses could have great advantages in efficiency for the organization. Of course, what you think of the existance of NASA in the first place or its usefulness in its current form is up to you...
Hate to break it to you but manned space flight has already been pioneered.
A small private company would want to invest the billions necessary to go to Mars because ?? What possible financial gain gould they possibly realise within any realistic timeframe for a company's survival. Who would back them, who would insure them? Would they go and claim Mars for themselves if they got there in the best capitalist manner ?
Proper space exploration is better left to the big boys and international co operation for the time being. Hopefully they can learn something from the independent efforts in the meantime
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Excepting anything that might be considered secret and confidential (like missile guidance software ... which probably never gets released anyway), why isn't all NASA software public domain?
I'm going on the assumption that we are talking solely about all the US taxpayer funded engineers making software there. Why isn't this stuff by definition public?
Well NASA proper doesn't have much to hide as far as i know in terms of the software they use. Most of the stuff that's interesting to the public at large is now in use in day to day life. I keep seeing you people say oh gosh oh gosh look at how basly they (nasa) hndle issues. I'd like to just one of you get get beyoned basic training. YOu have to be in reasonable good health, assess situations in an instant and deal with alot of genuine stress (no I don't meen DSL vs Cable.) It's also true that nasa is probably advcating for this for some PR,but on the other hand who's to say OSS bs GPL? Might be a BSD Licence or something else.
Bout time they quit wasting taxpayer's money
on "Intellectual Property" !!!
Think where we'd be if everything ever discovered
by NASA using taxpayer's money was patented
and copyrighted as "Intellectual Property"
Hmmmm If "Intellectual Property" was created
or found and documented with taxpayer's money
who does it belong to then ?
If the taxpayer own's it doesn't it then
become property of the people hence
making it GPL by proxy ?????
the correct terminology would be "GNU/NASA"
Get it right.
Y00 F4!1 !7
Next itme, just forget about posting, because you can't even make a good troll.
I seem to remember a long time ago about an incident where Bill Gates of Borg toured NASA and offered to GIVE AWAY PCs with M$ Windows on them so that NASA essentially ran on Windows. NASA supposedly did a long term study on Windows and determined that it was not stable enough to run the Space Shuttle and mission control equipment. There would be no way to recover the Space Shuttle during a launch in the event of a Blue Screen Of Death. This is supposedly the reason why Linux is so prevalent inside NASA. I may some facts wrong here, but this is pretty much what I heard through the grape vine.
Government Superior #1: "Were you able to trace it?"
Government Worker #1: "No, it's coming from all over the place, sir! We can't stop it!"
Government Superior #1: "Hmm... Perhaps... No, it can't be.. Not the dreaded SlashDotting..."
*RED ALERT*
NASA's software will have all the bugs it would've had under a closed source model, but at least the space shuttle's interface will have skins and GNOME support!
First of all open source is not GPL. Second promoting the use of it for nonessecntial stuff sort of makes sense, and chances are people are alreading using it and know it. TCP/IP comes to mind some parts of the internet to.
Like anyone waits for these reports to be written. At least it gave an intern something to do.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Who friggin' cares about skins and 'GNOME support' - I sure as hell don't.
just my personal theory.
no.
I used to work for Microsoft and was asked to help NASA several times with support/dev issues they were experiencing. I've visited the Space Center in Cape Canaveral, as well as some other external NASA locations, and they are using a lot of MS technologies. This is definitely a step in the right direction for the Open Source movement, but NASA has a long way to go before any Open Source initiative has any real impact on their development. Don't get me wrong, I'm very excited they made this decision, but it's a very small step. Besides, NASA has an extremely rigorous testing campaign for all new hardware and software, so these changes won't be noticed for some time to come. Otherwise this is a great step forward for OSS and I'm very pleased to hear about it! When I was working with them there was a huge aversion to OSS and it gave me the impression that they were diehard MS. There may still be hope for America's space development!
"Reality is a crutch for people who can't handle drugs" - George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)
X11 needs to be brought back to life.
guess you didn't read yesterdays story
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
What do a new rocket, and ditching the shuttle have to do with a windowing system? I'm confused. :-)
-Rusty
You never know...
I just can't see how this particular choice of license makes things better for the Linux community. NASA seems to be deliberately slapping us in the face with this.
It seems, from the PDF document (page 8) that their intent is to enable commercial exploitation of their code:
I think that since I've paid once for this proposed code, through my taxes, that there's something fundamentally wrong with allowing NASA to give the code to a business which will ask me to pay for it a second time.I'm sure that NASA hopes to collect a fat bribe ... no, a fat license fee ... no, a ``contribution to the Space Program''. That's what I said above, in the preceeding paragraph: this robbery is motivated by a desire to gouge me a second time for the work I paid for once.
See what I've been reading.
43 more moons were discovered orbiting Jupiter. All of which are now named Firebird.
Get paid to code OSS
For example, the SPICE library or various treecode programs for n-body simulations. So this is nothing new, though it is certainly welcome.
Here is a cut-n-paste contrast-compare from the NASA report:
The Mozilla Public License (MPL) attempts to strike a middle ground between promoting free source development by commercial enterprises and protecting free source developers. Like the GPL, it requires that any and all changes to code (derivative works) covered by the license must be made publicly available. However, it also allows you to combine covered code with other code to create a larger work without requiring that other code to be covered by the license. This is similar to, but even less restrictive, than the LGPL
So it's really great that some people within NASA are making a more formal push for open source software, and are even discussing releasing some of their own, but open source within NASA is hardly new!
When Windows Attacks:
t t_news=325.
http://www.thaivisa.com/index.php?514&backPID=10&
-- The world is watching America, and America is watching TV.
... when I first read the "Subject Line" of this thread I thought it said:
;)
We might be humping the gnu
No more Tang, right?
mt
Well,
I hope europeans (Ariane or whatever), will also consider switching to some OSS or similar license.....
Oh wait... it doesn't really matter.... they should first quit the tests on using floating point numbers in incompatible registers.....or the take off will definnitely be a problem.....
1. No sig. 2. ???? 3. Profit!!!
Why not advocate choosing the best possible package? Who cares if it is open / closed / hybrid source, as long as it functions properly?
But when contacted by CNETAsia, a spokeswoman from BMW Thailand said the car at fault was a 10-year old BMW 520i that had suffered a simple electronic failure. She declined to reveal if the firm received identical reports from other users in the country.
You can't complain about Microsoft FUD when the Anti-Microsoft FUD is just as bad.
Mooniacs for iOS and Android
If memory serves there was a big stink about NASA (Johnson Space Center Houston) switching their administrative desktops from Macs to Windows just a few years ago. If they kept all of the Mac hardware they could probably ressurect them as Linux terminals.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
that Dan Goldin, a.k.a. "the man who replaced all the Macs" at NASA would stand for it. He is FIRMLY in the Microsoft camp, and in 1997 appeared as a booster in Microsoft advertisements for Windows NT 4.0.
Goldin replaced perfectly good I.T. infrastructure with Microsoft equipment in the name of standardization; it says a lot about the entrenched bullshit beaurocracy at NASA that he rose so meteorically through the ranks at the Space Administration.
Stab the clown with a big knife. Blood will ooze out everywhere.
I didn't want to know that yet!
Manned spaceflight and new civilization on Venus? Would you volunteer for this? Venus is the hottest planet in the Solar System, with an average surface temperature of 854.33F. In addition to this, it's atmosphere is a poisonous combination of sulfuric acid and Carbon Dioxide. It is completely unihabitable, several, if not most of the unmanned probes we have sent there have just completely melted, and you want us to send someone there? How about you go to Venus. Now, Mars is a possibility. The main limiting factor right now keeping us from going to Mars is the distance. Then again though, the reason NASA hasn't sent anyone there yet it lack of money, and as someone else has already said, do you think a private corporation is going to send someone there, when there is little or nothing for them to gain out of the billions, possibly trillions of dollars they would have to spend on it?
~Brian
As I am currently doing my senior seminar project on various open source licenses and intellectual property. I am guessing that I will advocate MPL as opposed to GPL or any other license. It is very liberal open source, yet is still favorable from a business standpoint.
Lines of Code is the only measurement that matters with OSS isn't it?
In the drops - An Aussie's musings on all things cycling
NASA reported today that a software bug in their ODEEFUS hiring software system, a module intended to convert from metric to feet, has resulted in nation-wide employee panics, stupidity, and hysteria.
This marks the 2nd (or, in NASA terminology, 1.99996th) time that such a software bug has occurred. A NASA official, who asked not to be named, said that "It was just a lousy misplaced colon".
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Mod grandparent down. That such FUD continues to be modded up as interesting on /. is disturbing.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that OSS makes sense for government projects.
All your base are belong to us!
I know someone who is obsessed with reading source code. He keeps printouts in his bathroom for some light reading. He knows the Linux kernel inside and out. He regularly submits patchs all over the place. He would drool over the idea of reading code for satellites and the shuttle.
An old ledged has it that Djkstra saved the Apollo moon landing, because he happened across some code at NASA and questioned a minus sign in the thrust calculation. Turns out that the lander was set to thrust into the moon and not away from it on landing. I don't know if this story is true or not, or how distorted this nth retelling is, but it makes one think how many bugs could be caught by open sourcing. There are those who would love to read the code.
NASA's process relies on many many code audits, it only makes sense to get a few for free.
I used to wonder what was so holy about a silent night, now I have a child.
The more imaginative may notice a link here; essentially, NASA needed good networking in their Beowulf nodes, so they tweaked the drivers.
I am in a research lab working on software engineering tools and most of us would love to release the tools that we develop as Open Source. Unfortunately, we need to get the administration's support. (We've been trying for over a year on a software model checker named Java Path Finder and haven't had any luck yet.) We have other stuff like an C++ AST language model (in XML/Java) that we are currently developing that would also be nice to release.
I can understand the administration's desire to keep the software ownership for itself, but the greater good would be for us to release the tools under GPL. Especially, since the opportunities for commericialization are much more limited than they were a few years ago. Releasing the tools as Open Source would make them available to many more people and dramatically increase the impact of the work. A further complication was mentioned in the report is that we have a lot of contractors (~40%?) and the IP ownership is determined by the particular contract. *sigh*
We also use a lot Open Source code, including linux, x11, xemacs, ssh, gcc, cvs, etc. and it would be nice to give something back to the community.
I'm not a big follower of the space program itself, but common sense seems to lend itself to this idea. One would think that if NASA's software was open-sourced and being contributed to by people all over the world, it would greatly reduce the number of million dollar mishaps. This wouldn't help with hardware problems (malfunctioning sensors, etc...) but I strongly believe this move would make our space program that much better.
I truly hope this isn't a public relations ploy to take attention away from the shuttle disaster. I hope that this is a smart move to help keep a similar event from happening again.
Now I know why I've always loved NASA.
How nice. NASA is worried about whay _kind_ of software to run when they SHOULD be worried about exploring deep space, allowing private enterprise to manage Shuttle and Shuttle II and their myriad Operational Failures.
I can't find the energy to be enraged.
Clap. Clap. Clap. Good!
Why use a closed source media such as PDF when the article is about using open source software?
wouldn't html be much easier and faster (less bandwidth) than using a PDF?
just doesn't make sense.
Why read the article when I can just make up a snap judgement?
Have you been imprisoned for molesting little boys yet, or are you still one step ahead of Johnny Law?
A User was reportedly using Linux.
NASA Ames was Cygnus's first customer back in 1989. Support for GCC, GDB and the binutils. I know, I signed the contract.
Most of the parts of NASA that aren't politicized are really very good. NASA will go for anything that really gets the job done.
It's disappointing seeing how much bureaucracy I'd have to go through to release our secure HTTP and CIFS proxy/portal. We don't have time to work on it any longer and superior commercial products exist now. So why not give our code away, let interested hackers turn it into something really cool. But it would be a nightmare of approvals, especially his citation from the NASA Procedures and Guideline ( http://nodis3.gsfc.nasa.gov/library/displayDir.cfm ?Internal_ID=N_PG_2210_001A_&page_name=main&search _term=2210
)
I don't expect officials are really gonna want to read our code to ensure there's nothing of value to cryptoporn terrorists.So the code with just languish in our CVS repo, and die due to lack of interest. :-(
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these....
;)
Well, NASA did, and hence we can make that crummy joke. Don't believe me? Check your Beowulf cluster history
The fact remains, NASA has been involved open source software for a while and actually were the ones that contributed the idea of node-based parallel computing when they built the Beowulf project as a supercomputer on a budget.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
About the only way this is a coup for OSS is that most Americans could care less if some other country they can't find on a map makes a decision to go open source. (Seeing as how many can't find Canada on a map, let alone a state they don't live in, this makes sense.)
I was taking one day at a time, but then several days got together and ambushed me. (from a Rhymes with Orange comic)
...it's just a plan by NASA to get Microsoft to pay for a new Shuttle program.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
Wouldn't it make more sense for NASA to use a free software license? It seems that the GPL would be more compatible with the goals stated in the report. And, as someone else stated, we have already paid for it's development, so why not ensure that it remains free (as in freedom)?
Great after the way it was revealed that things do not work as smoothly over there as most of us believed now they are going to use software whith no, very little or very confusing documentation and no support. :)
Wasn't Nasa also involved in the development and testing of NSA secure Linux ?
Does this mean that SCO is going to sue the government too?
At work (I'm a scientist) we wanted to use some software developed by NASA. It was available for 200 hundred dollars, which is fine. What isn't fine is that in the end we couldnt buy it because our lab is based in the UK and thus "our tax dollars" hadnt gone into its creation.
No great shakes, I wrote my own version over a weekend (which tells you something about how sensitive or proprietry this stuff was, *and* it was about 12 years old) but it was a weekend I would rather have had off work.
Point is this, I'll be impressed with this change if it means that NASA will be conforming with the standard scientific practices of sharing data and (within reason) tools as most European researchers do as a matter of course.
Don't worry. There will always be a place on Earth for lazy bastards like yourself who are too afraid to explore the unknown. If our forefathers hadn't taken a chance and set out into the vast Atlantic ocean America might still be a continent infested with primitives.
Even if such a thing existed, NASA is public funded and has a duty to promote science and understanding. Using open source SW and contribute to FOOS, dovetails with that charter. Buying closed source does not.
Help fight continental drift.
..YES, I see no problem with the first humans there to claim it, and also declare their independence. This deal where only the currently established nations are IT, like no new ones are "allowed" some how, is bogus. I can see a group of investors and pioneers claiming mars, why shouldn't they? If no one else wants to go there, and they expend the energy and cost and take the huge risks? I see no moral claim to the current monopoly holders, none, hardly a nation out there that has the same borders it started out with. And I'll go further, NASA and the US government doesn't "own" space, it's none of their business if anyone decides to travel there. I think if someone can come up with a launching place someplace that the trajectory doesn't interfere or pose a risk to other people, say out over the 'free" ocean, then that's their lookout then. Launch away, and don't ask NASAs permission. This is like when they tried to squash space tourism, ta heck with that noise! Adventure, tourism, that's part of what builds exploration. It's not all of it, but back through human history a lot of places got explored almost just "because", it's what adventursome people DO. Ya, they would look for sponsors back then, swell, we can still use that technique. As to who, no idea, but I bet a nickle you could get interest in it. shares? How about colonize mars shares? buck a apiece? who knows, someone IS going there, I hate to have it only the few big governments we have now though, seems sort of bogus, because none of them are really all that great.. they mostly suck. US, china, russia, etc, none of them have a great track record, except exploitation.
When the explorers and pilgrims came to north america, they just really wanted to be free, to be rid of the old kings and weirdness, to just have a chance to start over, be themselves. Not perfect, not by a long shot, but that was a major part of it. Some were just looters and mercenaries and soldiers from some bogus regime, but a lot more were just.. pioneers. Space is the same deal. And I'd rather it was free of current established government controls and manipulations if at all possible. Dangerous and expensive? Yes! That's part of adventure! Risks and maybe some rewards? You bet, that's great!
And the MAIN deal to go there, what the reward is-it's ANOTHER PLANET, it's *not* "the earth".
We done ran out of continents to discover and colonize, you can't even colonize antarctica, because the monopoly governments all said "no mining", which you would need to do to live there full time, just to have adequate energy and raw materials, and they would send their bogus militaries to kill you, so that's out. Space, the deck might be stacked more evenly. Maybe,maybe not, but we won't know unless we try, and my guess is, humans will try it. I just hope it's free and independent humans, that's all.
Now that would be nice, but maybe they should start doing it with their own software instead of trying to sell it.
<A HREF="tco.gsfc.nasa.gov">tco.gsfc.nasa.gov</A&g t;
I wish your forefathers were lazy bastards, then they wouldn't have mated and brought out such a bigoted asshole like you.
"Only two security vulnerabilities in 17 years!"
I concurred in the release under a modified BSD style license of a Java Application Monitor developed for the US General Services Administration by a Sybase software engineer. At the time we were not clear about whether Government owned software could be released uinder an open source license and never fully resolved the issue. It was not clear whether this software was fully "Government" software or whether the engineer or Sybase had IP interests in it. The engineer, with concurrence from me and Sybase, ultimately released it under the above described license because that seemed to be the best way to allow others to use it and not abuse it.
It is still not clear to me whether the Government really has the right to limit use of its code under any sort of license. As others have pointed out here, and as the NASA software release guidelines state, most non-classified Government software is viewed as being in public domain. It would seem that anyone could ask for and (eventually) get such code through a Freedom of Information Act request. They would then be free to do anything they wanted except copyright the material -- use it for themselves, publish it, sell it, modify it, whatever. Any restrictions on use of the code such as are imposed by OS licenses would seem incompatible with the public domain nature of the material. It is trully free to use or abuse. It may be that the Government needs legislation to limit use of its software with an open source license.
Any Government lawyers out there with an IP background?
Don Heffernan
If they decide to release *ANY* of the code they wrote under a license that lets you use it at all, you should be happy.
How is it a slap in the face? IF it's *derived* from GPL code, obviously it has to be GPL. IF it's NOT, which is more likely the case, ie: It's their own original code, what right do you have to bitch about how they release it to you?
Just because they used linux?
yawn. What a stupid idea.
if you've seen Revolution OS, which is a pretty good flick to begin with, Bruce Perens (leader of the Debian project) talks about how he got an email asking how to use some sort of serial console with debian. he played with it, got something to work, and replied to the guy's post. the guy wrote back "Thanks, that works! I'll use it in the Space Shuttle." so there ya go.
I mod down pyramid schemes in sigs.