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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?"
Yes, there is. .. slowly; and being replaced with the comercial shit of Open Source development, which to me sound like the "zen of bussiness", and other productivididizied marketroid shit like that.
I Actually would go a little further than the GPL does, and forbide any use of Software under such license to create, or contribute in any way with propietary code. For example: you wouldn't be abel to use gcc to compile propietary code or GIMP to edit the splash screen; if it were for me,i would even say that someone that writes propietary code can't even use a Free mail client.
I'm not an extremist, i just see many different aproaches to kill Free Software, which are very diferent (and more scary), that the ones seen in the past: Before, They just attacked the comunity directly on the face, now they build busineses arround Free Software, that doesn't sound that bad at the first look, but it's rotting the hole spirit of the GNU Project, the GNU Project is disapearing, there are just left lots of different apps, eachs project on it's own, creating their own fundations, and reciving donations from the ones that are against them through those fundations.
So, the idea of creating the GNU operating System is fading out
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
The problem is the code written for the Government. Arguably, we should have access to it since we paid for it, but the authors have the copyright. Thus NASA's need for a special written-by-Government-contract-but-licensed-to-the -world license.
Do you want the US to make all those custom NSA & CIA data warehousing programs open source and downloadable by all? Have you ever looked at the CIA computer employment section? They have some really neat tech hidden somewhere. I'd guess that the big boys like IBM already have as much access to it that they need. I on the other hand as an average joe citizen don't need to know about it. They really don't many potential enemies of the US to look at it. Its not my job to worry about who wants to blow up the US. I don't have to worry about searching through Terabytes of Data for leads on things rated Top Secret. I'm happy just being in the country thank you very much.
In a secret government lab, my threat to the US government was just lowered a notch.