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

Sad

[ObviousGuy]

It's sad that NASA won't simply release the code into the public domain.

space agencies in other countries too?

[xot]

with me being in another country,would i be able to use the [OPEN] source code for my government space agency? Would the US govt permit that, nasa being a govt agency.
They would probably only release code which would not benefint most people don't you think? ;-)

Imagine a Beow...

[qtp]

Nasa seemed happy releasing code under the GPL for quite some time, and I find it odd that that is changing now.

Ever use a network card under Linux, much of the networking code came from NASA (mostly from Donald Becker).

Still dreaming about that Beowulf cluster? That also came out of NASA.

Perhaps the lawyers felt left out, so they're trying to do thier part and look useful. Why would NASA find that a license that has served them well for years needs replacing? Any lawyers opine on the new license yet?

Re:Old?

[BoneFlower]

Actually, the code on the older hardware may well be the most impressive. IIRC, the software that runs the Space Shuttle is the most bug free non-trivial program ever written. On hardware from the late 70's and early 80's.

I think there might be a few "Holy crap you can do that!?!?!!?" moments reading those sources. Tight optimizations, tricks for doing things that normally require massive support libraries linked together... might be some interesting techniques there.

About time

[Adam_Trask]

I have collaborated with NASA scientists, and you would be surprised how difficult it is for me (not being a NASA employee) to get the code written on NASA machines, even for the same project! They have to go thru a lot of (and i guess, agonizing) paperwork before they release any NASA-grown software. It has been easier for me (and them) to reinvent the wheel more than once at my lab.

For those wondering about the software produced, they employ folks from all branches of knowledge. Except finance, me thinks.

Re:NASA'Sdoom

[DarthWiggle]

The thing about it is that it seems that any NASA source code would be a monument to overbuilt, overengineered, triply-redundant failsafeness. This isn't entirely on point to your (witty) comment, but, I dunno... it seems like looking at this code might be like looking on some absolute crystal perfection of 1960s-1970s code-writing. No fancy classes or object-orientedness. None of this fun stuff. Just raw, uninteresting, bulletproof code (well, except that one little bit that forgot how much flash memory the rovers have... and the unit conversion problem... ok, anyway).

My question is: how much would we learn from this? When people writing code for business are optimizing for speed and redundancy mainly in the parallel sense (i.e., a failsafe swap to a sister server), how RELEVANT is that to blocks of code written never, ever, ever, ever, ever to fail on tested but "outdated" hardware?

Furthermore, if we ever get around to privately-built spacecraft, how much NASA code will they want to use? I dunno, it's a neat idea in an historical sense, and it's an admirable sign of government openness when the government is more and more closed to us citizens... but is it more?

I'm not saying it's not. I'm just curious how it would be. Is NASA /really/ churning out scientific algorithms that are far superior to those coming out of the private sector or universities? (Note that I'm not trashing NASA software folks... I'm just saying they write code for an almost entirely different set of priorities.)

Or maybe not?

Re:Government Copyright

[Sepodati]

They are public domain unless there are security reasons to not release the code. I just went through this with a program I wrote for DOD. Under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), you can request the source code to any program. Not saying they'll approve it, but unless there are "national security" type reasons, they should. In order for me to get a copy of my program to continue to develop and distribute on my own, I had to do a FOIA request on myself. :)

---John Holmes...

Re:Government Copyright

[djcinsb]

But I'm sure there are some private contractors somewhere along the line, and so what about their software?

That is exactly the point here. I'm working as a contractor on one of the pieces of software that started this effort. Basically, we'd like to release the software as open source so that we can get universities and others involved in the project, but still retain some level of control over it (and get some free publicity at the same time).

The goal isn't to keep others out of the process -- it's to get others involved, while making sure the final software product is of high quality. After all, if the software you're building is being used to fly spacecraft, you want to be sure it gives accurate answers.