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

My open source contribution to NASA

[product byproduct]

double Feet2Meters(double feet)
{
return feet * 0.3048;
}

Re:My open source contribution to NASA

[krog]

Again, in Ada please.

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: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;

Re:My open source contribution to NASA

[The Dobber]

Dear Applicant:

Upon review, we have decided not to accept your application for employment with NASA

Thank You ..

Re:My open source contribution to NASA

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear Employer,

Upon review, I have decided not to accept your rejection. I will be reporting to work on Monday.

So...

[American AC in Paris]

...is it "GNASA" now?

Re:So...

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it'd be GNU/NASA if they used the GPL license. But they seem to prefer Mozilla's license, so it will be NAZILLA.

Re:So...

[mahdi13]

It would be gNASA if they were using the gnome/GTK libraries, and kNASA if it is the KDA/QT libraires

Then as mentioned, Richard Stallman would make everyone call it GNU/NASA

Re:So...

[rusty0101]

would the extraction of GNASA be GNASAs Not A Space Agency by any chance?

Isn't government owned software public domain?

[pecosdave]

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

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.

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!

Not a wholesale switch

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

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: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.

in other news...

[Beatbyte]

43 more moons were discovered orbiting Jupiter. All of which are now named Firebird.

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?

Getting tools open sourced from NASA

[owenomalley]

I work at NASA/Ames as a senior software engineer in the Automated Software Engineering group and I reviewed Patrick's report a month ago. Patrick's report is the result of his efforts to convince management that it would be a good thing to release the scientific computing software that he had written to the public.

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.