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

International Collaboration

[Ikeya]

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

Isn't government owned software public domain?

[pecosdave]

I thought the government couldn't copywrite anything. Or does NASA not count?

Plain English of Licenses?

[johnynek]

I know some karma-whore can answer this:

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!

Re:My open source contribution to NASA

[sporty]

Careful of any rounding errors. Just stick with one "thing" and be done /w it :)

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 .. amusing.

-s

Re:Open Source for a closed system

[anonymous loser]

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?

Needless to say...

[Otter]

The site www.nasa.gov is running Apache/2.0.45 (Unix) mod_perl/1.99_09-dev Perl/v5.6.1 covalent_auth/2.3 DAV/2 CovalentSSL/2.3.3 RSA/SSLC mod_jk/1.2.2-beta-1 on Linux.

Like anyone waits for these reports to be written. At least it gave an intern something to do.

It was all good, until the MPL part.

[RealAlaskan]

From the FSF's license page (about halfway down the page):

The Mozilla Public License (MPL). This is a free software license which is not a strong copyleft; unlike the X11 license, it has some complex restrictions that make it incompatible with the GNU GPL. That is, a module covered by the GPL and a module covered by the MPL cannot legally be linked together. We urge you not to use the MPL for this reason.

This means that any MPL program may be distributed with GPL software, but cannot be reused with it. That is, Mozilla and Linux may be distributed together, but you can't take any substantial code from Mozilla and use it to make Gimp better.

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:

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. [snip]

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.

How about this?

[BigBir3d]

Why not advocate choosing the best possible package? Who cares if it is open / closed / hybrid source, as long as it functions properly?

A long-term issue

[real gumby]

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.