NASA Prepares to Open Source Code

comforteagle writes "According to this story at O'Reilly, NASA is looking for approval for their own open source license. The NASA submitter (lawyer of course) states that none of the current licenses meet their needs, but more interesting is that NASA needs a license at all. It makes one wonder what we, and other space agencies, might see coming out off NASA. It's also nice to see code that taxpayers paid for anyway being released for their use too. There must be at least one slashdotter who could dream up a use for NASA software. X Prize participants maybe?"

Comments

ITAR ITAR ITAR

[Anonymous Coward]

Not likely to be very workable. NASA can't release a lot of stuff because of ITAR restrictions. The US of A treats most space related items as being ITAR Restricted.

For those asleep at the keyboard, ITAR is International Traffic in Arms Regulations.

For example, check out Flight Linux:
http://flightlinux.gsfc.nasa.gov/

You'll note that even though required by the GPL, NASA refuses to release the sources because of ITAR prohibitions.

Move along, there is nothing to see here.

Re:Old?

[vondo]

Not to mention that they probably have plenty of stuff completely unrelated to science. Management software, utilities anyone might find useful, etc.

For instance, nedit, a great editor for people coming from Windows/Mac, was developed by Fermilab, a particle physics laboratory.

Re:Government Copyright

[Anonymous Coward]

You are basicaly correct.

U.S. Code Title 17 Chapter 1 Section 101:

A "work of the United States Government" is a work prepared by an officer or employee of the United States Government as part of that person's official duties.

and from Section 105:

Copyright protection under this title is not available for any work of the United States Government, but the United States Government is not precluded from receiving and holding copyrights transferred to it by assignment, bequest, or otherwise.

Although I will say that NASA seems to act like it owns the copyright on the images it produces.

Nothing new...

[vistas]

For over 30 years NASA code was available through a program called COSMIC which was administered at the University of Georgia.

http://www.cosmic.uga.edu/

In fact for awhile they operated out of one of the many buildings previously occupied by the 40 Watt Club

Since 1998 the code has been available through the Open Channel Foundation

http://www.openchannelfoundation.org/cosmic/

Re:Absolutely

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, for all of you out there who are in this position...

Please contact a NASA center and start asking around about doing joint research. NASA has a lot of research funding that requires joint work with a university, but you've got to hook up with the right researcher to get it. Every NASA center has an office that will help you find the people most likely to help you.

Believe me, if you need that image processing code and you are a university, a joint research agreement will get you a lot of help. If you need some other kind of code, and you think NASA has it, start calling around! It may be a bit of work, but you'll be surprised how eager many NASA researchers are to work with you.

Re:NASA'Sdoom

[sdedeo]

It's hard to judge superiority when the applications are often very specific; my experience with the code that gets passed from researcher to researcher is that it often works extremely well and can be adapted and extended a great deal. See, for example, CMBFAST, the code used to compute predicted anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background. Not only have people have parallelized it or sped it up (trading off for accuracy), but over the years it has been extended to test more and more exotic physics.

But code quality aside, what about applications elsewhere? NASA's codebase presumably does a wide variety of things in addition to running gazillion-ly redundant life support on the space shuttle. Think about all the design and testing it does of hardware, the software it writes for image processing and signal analysis, running the deep space network. How about making models of satellite structural integrity? Surely something useful -- although it might take someone within the field to realize the similarity between a problem they face and one NASA has already solved.

And, of course, scientists love to write their own tools for text editing, data analysis (often these are incredibly powerful and extendable -- naturally more so than, say, commercial software products which remain close-sourced), collaboration software, yadda yadda ad infinitum

NASA/USGS Image Processing Software

[dsoltesz]

This is probably the package you are looking for: Integrated Software for Imagers and Spectrometers. It's been distributed freely for many years, and is, indeed, public domain. It's funded by NASA for use by NASA-funded researchers and the planetary science community in general.

Note, Isis 3.0 has not been released yet, look for the beta in coming months - look at Isis 2.1 for the stable release. Download/Install instructions are on this page: Isis 2.1 Installation Guide.

Automatic mosaicking is generally done using the spacecraft positioning information. Automatic registration? It doesn't exist (yet). Registration involves varying levels of human intervention, and when some level of automation is achieved, it's mission-specific and under special circumstances. Isis is primarily a cartographic package - IDL is generally used for statistical work.

Another image processing package that's public domain is USGS MIPS. It's a (non-NASA) terrestrial image processing package that evolved from the same roots as Isis, so you'll find it has many of the same capabilities.

I don't know what other NASA packages there might be out there like this, if there are any. I'll ask around.