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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."
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!
I thought the government couldn't copywrite anything. Or does NASA not count?
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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
Careful of any rounding errors. Just stick with one "thing" and be done /w it :)
.. amusing.
Reminds me when i worked with sin's/cos's with a particular language. Instead of creating a table of sin's and cos's, which were functions that mapped back and forth properly, i used the actual sin and cos function.
Due to rounding errors, my object would spin and then shrink. Kinda
-s
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
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.
If you are operating on the cutting edge of some new technology, you are probably writing your own tools. Else, off-the-shelf tools are suitable for following in the footsteps of others. And you trust the software actually performs as specified.
- High Tech workers, please say NO to Union Carpenters, their Union sees fit to control our compensation.
The submitter said "some" projects.
What on earth makes you think they'd use linux or other OSS to develop the space shuttle software? First of all, the development process for space shuttle software is quite possibly the most rigorous software development process in the world (it is , BTW). There isn't a chance in hell open-source software would be allowed into a level 5 process, because it's not controlled properly. They would essentially have to rewrite any OSS software they used from scratch, just to meet CMM level 5 requirements.
Second, suppose despite point #1, they decide to use the linux kernel on the space shuttle. Obviously, they'd have to adapt the kernel to suit their needs, since most of the hardware on the shuttle is custom designed and built for it. Under the GPL they would have to release any changes they make to the kernel back into the public domain. This would be equivalent to providing a very detailed blueprint of how all the critical systems on the space shuttle function. Especially given the current political environment, do you really think the administration is going to divulge this kind of information to the public?
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...
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.
Why not advocate choosing the best possible package? Who cares if it is open / closed / hybrid source, as long as it functions properly?
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
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.
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.
1. Go to SourceForge and search for PDF
2. ???
3. Profit.
BTW, if you don't like the licenses and/or the code available there, do what I did: get the PDF spec and "clean room" it. The spec is, for the most part, quite lucid. I've probably spent 50-60 man-hours digesting the spec and coding. I've got scalable graphics working nicely now. That was all I really wanted, but now that I'm familiar with it, text and images are just an incremental upgrade. I've coded for text, but I haven't tested it. Inline images will require you to link in some encoding and compression but once you've done that it's all good.
I agree with you that HTML is much better for screen viewing. PDF is for printing, not screen-viewing. Improper use of PDF on the web has probably killed as many trees as Dutch Elm disease. Adobe's crappy free viewer pisses me off. It defaults to jerky page-viewing. I switch to "continuous" and whenever I move, it leaves bit-barf on the screen, and if I allow it to embed in IE it crashes half the time. The open spec almost makes up for that. Try doing a Google search to find the document. Google will sometimes provide an HTML version of PDFs.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
let's wax nostalgic for the pre-berne convention
days (1988) where, given usenet, at nasa ames
we never asked for management permission.
at least that's how 'fastfind' (1983) (now the
new-fangled 'slocate'), 'compress' (1984),
and '[ef]?grep' (1986) snuck out of there.
copyright scholars note that when the
states adopted berne, things became instantly
copyrighted "when fixed in a tangible medium
of expression". before that, actual registration
was necessary to preserve rights, so few
managements and even fewer programmers bothered.
most famously, r. crumb saw his "keep on truckin'"
art get converted to rubberized 18-wheeler
mudflaps this way...
ames!jaw
p.s. hey, sorry for all that trouble with sperry/unisys!