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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?
I can't believe *anyone* still trusts them or what they say.
I would strongly recommend taking this report with the proverbial grain of salt.
NASA was once good (back in the 1960s and 1970s) but has since lost most of its talent to private corporations.
What we need are more small, private, start-up type companies to pioneer manned spaceflight and a new civilization on other planets, such as Mars and Venus.
Open source has fewer bugs, right?
Tits up to the Trolls(tm)!! 6th post!
Hemos is gay.
Patrick J. Moran
NASA Ames Research Center,
M/S T27A-2
Moffett Field, CA 94035-1000
patrick.j.moran@nasa.gov
NAS-03-009
April 2003
Abstract
We present arguments in favor of developing an Open Source option for NASA software; in particular we discuss how Open Source is compatible with NASA's mission. We compare and contrast several of the leading Open Source licenses, and propose one -- the Mozilla license -- for use by NASA. We also address some of the related issues for NASA with respect to Open Source. In particular, we discuss some of the elements in the "External Release of NASA Software" document (NPG 2210.1A) that will likely have to be changed in order to make Open Source a reality within the agency.
To view the full report:
PDF Version -209kb
To read this file you will need the free Adobe Acrobat Reader.
Curator: Jill Dunbar Last Update: April 21, 2003 NASA Official: Walt Brooks
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.
A sad day in country music history with a career that covered more than 60 years she was truly a country music icon, even if you did not appreciate her work you have to acknowledge the impact she had on country music
0 74 6-7297r
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20030516-07
ok it's a troll but so what it's an accurate troll you fucks
It lets me know when I have to pay attention for those pI5t Fr05tz posts.
Also time for Nasa to switch to a NEW rocket and ditch the shuttle. THis would also be good for the economy. X11 needs to be brought back to life.
If you want to live a long and prosperous life, *sell* your software and ignore these parasitic licensing schemes.
NASA has been subverted! The terrorists have won!!!
The Dirty Sanchez, Etc.
From: "Br. Cleve"
Subject: the dirty sanchez, etc
Here is a fairly extensive compilation of some of the extraordinary sexual activities that can be performed by men:
1. Hot Lunch - While receiving head from a woman, you proceed to shit on her chest. (A.k.a. the Cleveland Steamer)
2. The Stranger - Sitting on your hand until it falls asleep and then jerking off, eliciting the feeling of a hand job from someone else.
3. Western Grip- When jerking off, turn your hand around, so that your thumb is facing towards you. It is the same grip that rodeo folks use. Hence, western.
4. The Blumpkin- You need to find a real tramp to do this right. It involves having her sucking you off while you are on the shitter.
5. Donkey Punch - Banging a girl doggy style and then moments before you cum, sticking your dick in her ass, and then punching her in the
back of the head. This gives a tremendous sensation, but for it to work correctly, the girl must be knocked out so that her asshole tightens up.
6. Golden Shower - Any form of pissing all over a chick (a.k.a.- watersports)
7. Pearl Necklace - Well known. Whenever you cum on the neck/cleavage area of a girl - it takes on the look of beautiful jewelry.
8. Coyote - This occurs when you wake up in the room of a nasty wombat and you know you've got to give her the slip. However, you realize that your arm is wrapped around her. Therefore you must gnaw off your own arm to get out of the situation. Can be very painful.
9. Purple Mushroom - This occurs when a woman is giving you oral sex and you withdraw your penis in order to poke it back into her cheek. It should leave a lasting impression similar to purple mushroom.
10. The Flying Camel - A personal favorite. As she is lying on her back and you are hammering her from your knees, you carefully balance yourself without using your arms to prop yourself up. You then proceed to flap your arms and let out a long, shrieking howl, much like a coyote. Strictly a class move.
11. Fishhook - A variation of the shocker in which you pull back towards the pussy after you stick your finger up her anus.
12. The Ram - Again, you're attacking from behind, when you start ramming her head against the wall in a rhythmic motion. The force of the wall should allow for deeper penetration. Very handy for those lulls in penile sensitivity.
13. Bismarck- This is another one involving oral sex. Right before you are about to cum, you pull out, shooting your load all over her face. Follow that with a punch and smear the blood and cum together.
14. Jelly Dougnut: A derivation of the Bismark. All you have to do is punch her in the nose while you are getting head.
15. The Woody Woodpecker: When a girl is sucking on your balls, tap the head of your cock on her forehead.
16. Dog in a Bathtub - This is a proper name for when you attempt to insert your nuts into a girl's ass. It is so named because it can be just as hard as keeping a dog in the tub while giving it a bath.
17. Tossing Salad - Another prison act where one person is forced to basically chow asshole with the help of whatever condiments are available, i.e. Jell-O, olive oil, etc. I'm never going to prison.
18. Rim Job: Another name for tossing salad. Focuses on the use of the tongue.
19. The Bucking Bronco- An all time classic. You start by going doggy style on a girl and then just when she is really enjoying it, you grab onto her tits or hips as tightly as possible and call her a big fat no-good worthless slob. More than likely, she will try to escape. This will give you the feeling of riding a bronco as she tries to buck you off.
20. Pink glove - This frequently happens during sex when a girl is not wet enough.
When you pull out to give her money, the inside of her twat sticks to your hog. Thus, the pink glove.
21. The Fountain of You - While sitting on her face and having her eat your ass, jerk off like a mad
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.
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
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...
It is official -- Netcraft is now confirming: Trolling is dying.
One more crippling bombshell crushed the already beleaguered Slashdot troll community when IDC confirmed that "NASA is obsolete" was one of the weakest, stupidest and most transparent attempts at trolling that has ever been posted to Slashdot. Quality troll content is now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all attempted trolls. Coming on the hells of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that troll quality is nowhere near what it once was, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict trolling's future. Bad trolls flow like a river of blood. Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers. Troll leader Vladinator states that there are 7000 users of TrollTalk. The number of troll versus non-troll posts on TrollTalk is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 1400 Slashdot trolls. Yet very few of them are capable of producing content that is even remotely amusing. This is consistent with the number of TrollTalk posts.
All major surveys show that trolling has steadily declined in quality. Trolling is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If trolling is to survive at all, it will be among crapflooding kiddies and pear-shaped virgins. Trolling continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, trolling is dead.
Fact: Trolling is dying
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.
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.
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)
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!
oh the movie came out yesterday, everyone probably knows already
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
Go see the Matrix: Reloaded, geekboy!
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.
I didn't want to know that yet!
test
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.
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;
"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.