Re:The Plan for Code
by mturmon on Thursday January 05, 2012 @08:19PM
(#3431468)
It used to be that, if you wanted to distribute NASA-sponsored software using an open-source-like model, it had to be done through Open Channel foundation. Here's a press release which gives a flavor of how that looked:
Open Channel was an antique system (pre-WWW) in which software was "thrown over the fence" to a caretaker, with no provision for general users to contribute back. So, faced with a long process of approval and little possibility of tangible benefit, it was unusual for software to be released that way.
I'm not certain about the reason for a long approval process. Since about 1999, there is ITAR, which is a huge impediment, but open-sourcing was hard even before ITAR.
My guess is that NASA wished to (or was required to, by Congress) recover some costs by licensing the software, and this was the reason for the impediments to open-sourcing. In this way, the government was treating software more like hardware components than like documentation of research results.
NASA as an agency has always had an uneasy relationship with software. It's much more comfortable with hardware technology, and tends to treat software technology by analogy with hardware.
http://www.openchannelsoftware.com/NASA_1.html
Sounds pretty bureaucratic to me.
Open Channel was an antique system (pre-WWW) in which software was "thrown over the fence" to a caretaker, with no provision for general users to contribute back. So, faced with a long process of approval and little possibility of tangible benefit, it was unusual for software to be released that way.
I'm not certain about the reason for a long approval process. Since about 1999, there is ITAR, which is a huge impediment, but open-sourcing was hard even before ITAR.
My guess is that NASA wished to (or was required to, by Congress) recover some costs by licensing the software, and this was the reason for the impediments to open-sourcing. In this way, the government was treating software more like hardware components than like documentation of research results.
NASA as an agency has always had an uneasy relationship with software. It's much more comfortable with hardware technology, and tends to treat software technology by analogy with hardware.