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."

Comments

Re:Isn't government owned software public domain?

[pecosdave]

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.

Re:Open Source for a closed system

[JordanH]

• Please, somebody explain to me how open source on a closed, specific system helps...

  ...

  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.

Re:My open source contribution to NASA

[Amazing Quantum Man]

It's been a while, but I'll give it a shot.

type Feet is new float;
type Meters is new float;
function Feet_To_Meters(Number_of_Feet : in Feet) return Meters is
var
Temp : float;
begin
Temp := Feet;
Temp := Temp * 0.3048;
Feet_To_Meters = Temp;
end Feet_To_Meters;