Slashdot Mirror
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."
Here we go
Publications Incorporating U. S. Government Works
Works by the U. S. Government are not eligible for U. S. copyright protection. For works published on and after March 1, 1989, the previous notice requirement for works consisting primarily of one or more U. S. Government works has been eliminated. However, use of a notice on such a work will defeat a claim of innocent infringement as previously described provided the notice also includes a statement that identifies either those portions of the work in which copyright is claimed or those portions that constitute U. S. Government material.
Example: © 2002 Jane Brown. Copyright claimed in Chapters 7-10, exclusive of U. S. Government maps
Copies of works published before March 1, 1989, that consist primarily of one or more works of the U. S. Government should have a notice and the identifying statement.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
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?
Ever work in a large software shop? I didn't think so.
Any operation of any size at all generates lots of software tools and libraries that are more or less generic.
In addition, NASA does lots of Scientific Visualization, materials engineering, simulations, data acquisition and other stuff that is not directly related to embedded flight control systems. Lot's of good science that's not just "Office Stuff".
I'm probably missing more than a few, but just these examples are things that could be opened up.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
If you just cast a magical spell "gpl mpl bsd apache" on google.com, you get:
http://www.linuxworld.com/linuxworld/expo/lw-thurSo 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!
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.
Unfortunately this seems to be a hoax:
CNET reports that, contrary to rumours that the BMW that trapped a Thai minister inside earlier this week was "the famously glitchy BMW 745i car, and its Windows CE-powered iDrive car computer", it was, according to a spokeswoman from BMW Thailand, the 10-year old BMW 520i model that "suffered a simple electronic failure".
(from Looswire)
Sailing over the event horizon
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.