NASA Achieves Data Goals For Mars Rover With Open Source Software

caseyb89 writes "Open source projects Nginx, Railo CMS, and GlusterFS are powering Mars Curiosity's big data crunching. 'Taken together, the combination of cloud and open source enabled the Curiosity mission to provide beautiful images in real time, not months delayed; at high quality, not "good enough" quality. A traditional, proprietary approach would not have been this successful, given the short time to deployment and shifting requirements that necessitated the ultimate in agility and flexibility.'"

Comments

And a perfect example,

[Anonymous Coward]

...of precisely where open-source should be applied; NASA. I like to imagine such endeavors are not self-serving, but public, and for anyone with the will and ability, to either contribute, admire, or simply understand.

Re:This is all about the PR end of the system

[0racle]

It's about the web hosting system that lets casual visitors look at the pretty pictures

Functions which are important to the project.

AWS Seems like winner here

[devforhire]

AWS seems like the real key to the success here, not the use of open source software. While I think it's great that NASA took the open source route, I've read nothing to defend the position that this would not have been successful with non-open source software:

"A traditional, proprietary approach would not have been this successful, given the short time to deployment and shifting requirements that necessitated the ultimate in agility and flexibility."

Even the article praises AWS more than the open source software mentioned, it's main source of content appears to come from the linked article with information about the open source pieces of the stack added.