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Radical Transparency at NASA Via Second Life
An anonymous reader writes "Aaron Rowe over at Wired has an article about a couple of young scientists at NASA's Ames Research Center working to open source the space program through software development and other ways to allow the public to participate in real NASA programs. According to Robert Schingler, the NASA CoLab project manager, 'CoLab is building an infrastructure to encourage and facilitate direct participation from the talented and interested public...' Apparently, the group holds weekly meetings on their island in the popular online virtual world Second Life."
You know, that's what I thought too. "Oh, goody, yet another corporation/agency/whatever thinks that Open Source is just a way to get unpaid labour." I don't know... maybe I'm just jaded because of previous bad experiences, but it always leaves a bad taste.
Does it mean that NASA and their contractors will also open-source (or put under a Creative Commons, public domain, etc) _their_ research? Or is it yet another "well, you can do some free work for us" scheme? If I contribute code to say, some control module, will the rest of the schematics there be made public, or does some corporation get to patent it, get it paid by pork-barrel politics, _and_ get the software for it for free?
And reading about virtual meetings in Second Life sure doesn't make it sound like something serious. It sounds more like some "let's pretend that we're hip and fly and on their level" idea a PHB might have.
On the flip side of the coin, I'm wondering how many actual free work will they actually get. Most working OSS nowadays is actually paid work by the likes of IBM, Sun, etc. Check out some of the credits or change logs in Linux some day. Fanboys paying lip service are a dime a dozen, people who can actually produce high quality code... tend to be paid for their work. There are already gazillions of projects on Sourceforge that discovered that, ESR's bullshit be damned, there _aren't_ hordes of hackers just begging to come do some free work.
Mind you, space stuff might generate more buzz, but I still have to wonder exactly how much.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I just don't get the whole secondlife thing. Exactly how is it better than IRC ... or AOL chatrooms? It's graphic? Okay... so you need a really expensive computer and lots of bandwidth to play...
... do what?
... for free?
What, you can't play it? Oh... so you mean you just cruise around jerkily and congregate either on purpose or randomly.
Oh, okay... so you pretend to be a hot girl and
Oh, okay... so you design "virtual clothes" and sell them to people who want their avatars to load slower?
No, wait... you make "geek island" and invite all the lonely geeks on their computer to come and try to solve real problems?
Phase 1: Press release including Second Life
Phase 2: ?
Phase 3: Profit!