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NASA Releases 2017-2018 Catalog of Software For Free (nasa.gov)
mspohr writes: Eureka Magazine has a story about the latest NASA 2017-2018 software catalog. From the report: "NASA has released its 2017-2018 software catalogue free of charge to the public, without any royalty or copyright fees. This third edition of the publication has contributions from all the agency's centers on data processing/storage, business systems, operations, propulsion and aeronautics. It includes many of the tools NASA uses to explore space and broaden our understanding of the universe. 'The software catalogue is our way of supporting the innovation economy by granting access to tools used by today's top aerospace professionals to entrepreneurs, small businesses, academia and industry,' said Steve Jurczyk, associate administrator for NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD) in Washington. 'Access to these software codes has the potential to generate tangible benefits that create jobs, earn revenue and save lives.'" Amazing amount of quality software... it IS rocket science. Further reading (and digesting): TechCrunch
Yeah. And the ISS was in part paid by me, so I want a ticket on the next ride there to inspect my property!
Just because something is funded by taxes doesn't mean that it automatically lands in the public domain. Sorry.
But I think it is good when a government agency decides to give back to the public, stuff that lies outside of their normal operations.
Yeah. And the ISS was in part paid by me, so I want a ticket on the next ride there to inspect my property!
Just because something is funded by taxes doesn't mean that it automatically lands in the public domain. Sorry.
Most appropriate response.
I would just like to say thank you, and I hope that other government agencies worldwide contribute equally. Being born when astronauts were taking the first steps towards the moon I have always held NASA in high regard and it is fabulous that they keep impressing many decades later.
Which is, of course, why NASA keeps giving the software away to the public - who did, after all, pay for it. Their contributions to the rest of the economy has been pretty significant. There's hardly a data-center left in the world that doesn't have clusters. Big cloud providers like AWS utterly rely on them for reliability and performance scaling - and their early-use cases like building cheap super-computers for things like climate modeling, aerodynamic engineering or rendering awesome looking animated movies are all alive and well.
And that all started at NASA with the original Beowulf clusters - a technology idea they subsequently made freely available and became one of the original major growth-points for Linux in science and industry.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
You can check out what is publicly/globally available on github: https://github.com/nasa
On their main software page, there is a LOT of stuff that is by request only but github is all the easy to get stuff.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
For a cruise misile "hit the building we were aiming at and not the hospital next door" counts as "safe landing". Sadly even by that definition the US's cruise misiles rarely "land safely". From which I can only conclude that NASA didn't write their software. NASA tends to land things safely far more often than not. They've had a few nice landings on MARS now for example - the ESA's last attempt went kerplatz.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
You may have helped pay for the development, but publishing is a discretionary expense. Some agencies would say you can have it, but you need to pay for the manpower to get it into a publishable format. ($0.10 copying fee for a friendly and well-organized local government office, much much more for a query made by the FOIA which requires a lengthy search.)
I haven't actually heard of a super pricey information retrieval fee, but I'd be surprised if it hasn't happened.
A cat can't teach a dog to bark.
The thing is, this is already default for NASA. NASA is far more open than ESA. They public domain everything they can, and are much more open about releasing raw data, sooner. ESA is the one that really needs to get past its closed culture.
I'm not quite getting the point of this "release", since I use a number of pieces of NASA software and have always been able to get what I need. I guess they're just taking down the request forms or something? The real problem IMHO has never been "getting it", it's been "getting it to work". They make some very neat things, but they have such small user bases that they're not well refined, and getting them to work on your platform or finding quality documentation can be a pain.
The big brain am winning again! I am the greetist! Now I am leaving for no particular raisin!
Just because something is funded by taxes doesn't mean that it automatically lands in the public domain. Sorry.
Well, actually, it did once. Back before universities routinely monetized their work and R&D was allowed to do things without guaranteeing a profit by next quarter. And everything the government did was expected to be privatized.
One of the first RDBMS's was a public domain NASA project (developed by Boeing, I believe).
Legend has it that Prime Computer was founded when a bunch of engineers at Honeywell got fed up with their employer's apathy towards developing computer systems in-house, took a public-domain NASA OS written in Fortran, and developed hardware optimized to run it. NASA certainly was one of their clients, because every time one of their systems at KSC blew a board, an Prime engineer would yank one of ours (the price of getting a high-end minicomputer at a discount).
Supposedly, even software designed for the CIA was open-sourced as long as it was considered safe for national security. I've heard claims that some of the prototype code for Oracle was available that way.
Yeah, NASA has always been terrible at public outreach. Anyone ever seen the NASA TV channel? Just terrible. There's no excitement in anything they make for the public, despite the fact that they're working in one of the most exciting fields out there. Contrast with what SpaceX does, where each launch is almost like a sporting event, with "newscasters" and "commentators", screaming crowds, HD footage from multiple angles, etc. That's PR. And I doubt they're spending a fortune to do so, versus what everything else costs in rocketry.
Perhaps the most exciting thing NASA does is their press conferences to announce findings (say, post-flyby preliminary results and the like). But I think only space geeks like myself can get excited about a NASA press conference.
Some parts of the US federal government are good at PR: The military is an obvious one - they work closely with TV and movie producers to get them enthusiastic and supportive. They manage it top to bottom, wanting to see whole scripts in advance to make sure that they portray the military in a good light - and if they do, they get access to locations, hardware, troops, gear, almost anything. They even require producers to have a minder.... er... I'm sorry, "technical adviser", who follows them around and (strike)makes sure they make it positive like they promised(/strike)offers "helpful advice". It's a sleek operation of mutual exploitation, where the military gets free PR and recruiting, and the movie makers get taxpayer-funded hardware, locations and manpower.
Not that NASA should go that far. But they should do a lot better than something with the quality of a late-night public access TV channel. They have amazing facilities, settings and people, and are doing exciting things. They should modernize their PR.
The big brain am winning again! I am the greetist! Now I am leaving for no particular raisin!
Their collection of 3D models is nice: https://github.com/nasa/NASA-3...
Is there even ONE slashdotter who's going to comment on the **contents** of the catalog instead of bitching about governments and copyright issues (of which they most likely know very little)?
I'd be much more interested in reviews/ ratings of software tools for various tasks than in what NASA allegedly is or isn't keeping from the public.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw