NASA Ames Gets OSI Certified

Lunchy writes "A long standing monument to the growth of research and development in Silicon Valley, the NASA Ames Research Center has done advanced research in the area since 1939. Originally, the center focused on aircraft (and dirigible) research but it is now a high-tech computer science center. The open source community may be interested to know that NASA Ames is now OSI Certified and is releasing some of their software under open source licenses."

Re:Neato Simulations

[Anonymous Coward]

nah, it's just an opportunity for us regular people to fix that english/metric conversion algorithm.

Re:Neato Simulations

[Piquan]

Are any of the released packages neato super keen simulations of stuff?

Read the article. [nasa.gov] It has a list and descriptions of the packages they released so far.

Where exactly IS Nasa Ames?

Exactly? I can't remember. About? In California. In the Silicon Valley. In Sunnyvale. If you're on 237 eastbound, look left just before you hit 101 (pretty much near the overpass with the red warning lightpoles next to the golf course); look for the big blimp hangers. It's nestled in with Moffet Field and Lockheed-Martin, and across the street from Juniper.

What areas of technology do they focus on?

Lots and lots of stuff, and it changes. Anything that has to do with aeronautics or space, even indirectly. This includes weather, materials research, supercomputers, health, nanotechnology, AI, to cherry-pick just a few. Look at the AMES web page [nasa.gov] for more information.

Are they part of creating the generic space probe operating system software that the Mars Rovers were saying was such a good thing?

I'm not quite sure which bit you're referring to. The rover was primarily the JPL's [nasa.gov] baby, but AMES did a lot of the mission support software [nasa.gov]. One of the coolest things I think I saw in that software development was the C Global Surveyor [nasa.gov] system.

Can ordinary Schmo's like me contribute to any projects or are they so esoteric and strange it would be useless?

Some projects are quite advanced. Some are pretty much glorified xearth's. Again, read the article [nasa.gov].

Good news

[mwheeler01]

I think this is pretty good news. The more big government agencies that work with open source the better the backing will be when something like software patents come center stage in the supreme court.

Re:Good news

[d00gieb]

(IANAL) Patents give you the right to exclude others -- except the federal government. So, just because the government produces some code which exercises a patent, that doesn't necessarily protect the rest of us...

CFD codes, etc?

[4of12]

Historically, a lot of interesting developements in computational fluid dynamics, particularly compressible aerodynamics, have come out of NASA Ames.

I didn't see any of those codes showcased on the webpage, though:(

Re:CFD codes, etc?

[chris_mahan]

from what I understand having looked at the various project (CODE looks interesting) my impression is that they need help, because the projects are very complex and they probably can't dedicate the manpower needed to see them through.

On the other hand, it would be rad for street cred if _your_ code was used in a spacecraft.

Correction

[Anonymous Coward]

Please note that NASA Ames didn't get OSI certification. The NOSA ( NASA Open Source Agreement ) got OSI certification. Ames just happens to be the center that spearheaded the project and is the first Center to release Open Source Software.

This is not a minor deal.
Politically this means a researcher can open their project to the community and people like you and me will have access to things that only the likes of lockheed-martin and boeing could get their hands on before. Basically you are getting something back for your tax dollars, not simply paying to subsidize research for the aerospace industry.

Educationally this may make it easier for NASA researchers to collaborate with researchers interested in the same domains without having to go through everybodies favorite buddy, government red tape.

Lastly many there is a pretty strong currrent of Computer Science researcher flowing between places like NASA, Stanford, Carnigie-Mellon, UC Santa Cruz, and MIT. We can joke all we like about sending millions of dollars into space and missing MARS but the research done inside NASA is world class and the creation of an open source license is the first step in bringing some of the most bleeding edge code in the industry code to your finger tips.

does this replace the COSMIC initiative?

[retiarius]

v.i.z. http://www.openchannelfoundation.org/

when i was a young lad at nasa ames giving away things
like free implementations of lempel-ziv compression,
boyer-moore search grafted to 'egrep',
thompson-style prefix coding for file search,
and combinatorial anagram madness of all kinds, i.e.

http://developers.slashdot.org/
comments.pl?sid =64438&cid=5977419

we were encouraged to donate to COSMIC if development
costs exceeded ten kilodollars. natch, on govt. pay
many of us worked cheap, so we just put stuff up on 'uucp'
as public domain...

The sign of the times

[jgardn]

With the funding of both manpower and pure intellect of the Ames research center, we are gaining a huge improvement to our resources as open source developers.

I won't expect a drastic increase due to this particular news anytime soon. These scientists and many scientists like them have been contributing before Bill Gates learned to crawl. I do expect more research centers to begin actively endorsing open source and moving away from proprietary licenses.

If all the major universities and research centers adopted an open source strategy, then all the corporate research centers would have to follow suite, or be cut off from their developments. If all the corporate research centers are doing open source, then all new software will be open source.

This is another step towards total world domination.

I think RMS is finally seeing his vision come true. Kudos to RMS! May Free Software live forever!