NASA To Host Open Source Summit

PyroMosh writes "'On March 29 & 30, NASA will host its first Open Source Summit at Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. This event will bring together engineers and policy makers across NASA and respected members of the open source community to discuss the challenges with the existing open source policy framework, and propose modifications that would make it easier for NASA to develop, release, and use open source software.' It's nice to see NASA keeping up the spirit of give-and-take that OSS is built around."

Comments

What we did in the Army.

[bobs666]

Mike Wrote Ping, and did a lot of work on Bind the name server. Doug Wrote the System V libc library that ran on BSD Unix. Doug's Library let us run both BSD code and Sys5 code on the same platform for the first time. There was a lot more, but this is what people may remember.

Money

[camperdave]

I wish congress would loosen its purse strings so that NASA can actually develop a proper functional space program. I'd like to see ATHLETE deployed on the Moon.

BTW, whatever happened to NASA's Cool Robot of the Week? It hasn't been updated since 2003!

Re:BSD would make more sense ...

[boojum.cat]

I work for a US government lab (NIST) and the software I write is freely available and not subject to copyright, by law. I would expect the same rule to apply to NASA. The lack of copyright actually causes a problem for us, because the GPL requires that authors copyright their code so that they can apply the GPL to it. That means that we can't apply the GPL and therefore can't use GPL code. I hope this is the sort of issue that this conference is going to iron out.

  -- Steve