Open-source software has been making inroads into U.S. federal agencies for years, most notably in January when the U.S. Department of Defense set up an internal forge to host open-source software for use by the government.
Now NASA, not to be outdone, has created its own open-source software repository, with a diverse array of software available "as an essential response to the needs of NASA missions."
NASA indicates several purposes for making its software open source:
- To increase NASA software quality via community peer review.
- To accelerate software development via community contributions.
- To maximize the awareness and impact of NASA research.
- To increase dissemination of NASA software in support of NASA's education mission.
Some of the 23 projects currently listed, like BigView, reflect a developer focus. BigView "allows for interactive panning and zooming of images," but only if you're running Linux on your desktop.
Others, like Livingstone2, have little application beyond NASA, but are very cool all the same. Livingstone2 "is a reusable artificial intelligence (AI) software system designed to assist spacecraft, life support systems, chemical plants or other complex systems in operating robustly with minimal human supervision." I doubt many developers have spacecraft to test the system on, but perhaps the code could be applied to other scenarios?
And that's the point. With open source, as Glyn Moody writes, you don't need to see all potential applications of your code. You just open it up and others decide how they'll reuse it.
NASA open-sources the software to perhaps help it to get to the moon and back. You might have other purposes for it. With open source, your mileage may vary.
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Open source is such a natural for government agencies, it should come as no surprise that NASA is now developing an open-source project called CosmosCode. The goal? "To provide a common access point for individuals, academics, companies, and space agencies around the world using, contributing to, or supporting re-usable, modular, extensible, or standards driven space exploration software.
It's a great way to combine the private and public sectors to break new ground in space exploration, perhaps leaning toward the type of model that John Lilly describes in a recent post about hybrid projects that exist for profit (money) and profit (community). Two goals of the project suggest this:
- Explore the cost-benefit of leveraging the free and open source development process for projects that normally costs millions of dollars in development and testing;
- Open a door to our silicon valley neighbors and encourage private industry to create products and services which leverage and extend NASA's investments, extending their applicability and relevance to the commercial sector....
It sounds very cool. Given Google's past work with NASA, I'm assuming it will be involved. It will be interesting to see who else joins in.
(Credit:
Jack Aboutboul)
From its countdown server to the video streams behind NASA TV, NASA runs a lot of Fedora (and Red Hat Enterprise Linux), as Jack Aboutboul was privileged to see on a recent tour of NASA's facilities in Jacksonville, Florida.
I suppose it's not surprising that an organization like NASA would use free software like Fedora, in addition to its commercial cousin, RHEL. After all, NASA is powered by rocket scientists (pun intended) that want maximum control over their IT. Fedora gives that to them. No, they don't get commercial support for it, but they likely don't want it, either.
There are some things for which organizations are best positioned to self-support. For everything else, there's commercial open source.
In a speech celebrating NASA's fiftieth anniversary, Google's CEO Eric Schmidt urged NASA to be more collaborative with other agencies and even the general public. He suggested that Google's successes often result from opening up without knowing where the breakthroughs would occur.
While Schmidt acknowledged that government agencies like NASA can't wholly adopt Google's "shift and iterate" model whereby it throws a lot of projects at the wall to see what sticks, it
...can learn from open-software development and projects like Linux and MySQL, where collaboration is necessary. And the agency can learn about the value of flexibility from companies like Google, he said.
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