
NASA Open Source Software - selmat
https://code.nasa.gov/#/
======
chrisatumd
I had no idea this was out there. I found a bunch of old projects out here
from a program I work on in the realm of Earth Science. Things from 2002 and
2004 that have probably not been used in over 10 years (and some from the same
time frame that are still in production).

It has been really hard for us to open source things lately - our last project
took more than a year. I did find it on this page:
[https://github.com/nasa/earthdata-search](https://github.com/nasa/earthdata-
search). We are still working on open sourcing a couple more of our projects.

We've been told one of NASA's recent goals is to significantly improve the
open source process so hopefully we'll see more of the current projects become
open source.

~~~
moron4hire
Why is it hard to open source things?

~~~
fma
Liability. Same thing with why it can be hard to use open source in a large
company. Liability.

If something screws up they dont want to be sued. If you use open source you
can't sue someone if it breaks...but if I use Oracle I can get support and in
extreme case sue for damages.

~~~
peterkshultz
But don't most open source licenses waive liability? MIT and other popular
licenses state that the work is provided "as is" and that the author cannot be
held liable.

~~~
dragonwriter
> But don't most open source licenses waive liability?

Most open source licenses include a liability disclaimer. Many jurisdictions,
OTOH, have laws which limit the effect of liability disclaimers, so whether
the disclaimer means anything, and if so what it means, varies based on which
jurisdictions law applies to the liability at issue.

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wang_li
I thought the law was that all software, books, papers, etc. created by the US
government was public domain. Seems odd to see licenses on this stuff.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_work_by_th...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_work_by_the_U.S._government)

~~~
cdibona
This is true(ish) but what happens in much of the USG is that they have
contractors write the code and there is a big hole cut in the law to allow
contractors to retain copyright and monetize code written for the government.
The idea was that by allowing contractors to retain copyright, the costs would
go down for government procurers and it allowed them to consider 'commercial
off the shelf' (COTS) software.

In practice, the government can and has been locked into contractors for
ongoing, unending and expensive maintenance.

~~~
bluejekyll
Any software or hardware built for the US or any State government should be
required to be open sourced, with zero restrictions. Same with research.

It's ridiculous that we as tax payers don't have access to what _we_ pay for.

I'm glad you've put so much effort into cutting through the red tape to get
this out there. Thank you.

~~~
bigredhdl
This isn't as cut and dry as you might think. Should the US govt. pay full
development cost for all software it contracts out? Contractors often take
less NRE than makes sense if they can make a business case for said software
elsewhere. If all contracts mean the work will be open source, then NREs will
go up dramatically.

~~~
wang_li
Contrast a private software development house with a company that only
services government contracts. Why should the second have the benefit of
having all the development expenses covered by the tax payer while retaining
the same rights as a company that doesn't have those costs covered.

Seems to me that if you fund the development of the product from your own
reserves, you have the right to sell to the government like it was any other
customer. But if you do it as a work for hire, it's kind of bullshit to get to
keep the rights and resell to other parties when possible -- who have already
paid the development costs through their taxes.

It would also be a bit skeevy if the government was using tax payer money to
develop products that compete with existing off the shelf products. Kind of
bad manners to take someone's money and then use that to kill their business
too.

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0xmohit
It feels sad to click a link that makes one's browser freeze. The link in
question is a fine example.

~~~
vonklaus
ublock block count is 94 on my machine. Seems pretty high for a .gov site.

~~~
dom2
Hmm, mine is only at one. Wonder why.

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323454
Woah! A web based mission control framework!
[https://nasa.github.io/openmct/](https://nasa.github.io/openmct/) Totally
sweet! Let's launch some rockets from our browsers and shoot down that pesky
moon once and for all

~~~
Natanael_L
Somebody needs to connect this to KSP

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Animats
This is cheaper than NASA's COSMIC repository.[1] There, for a few thousand
dollars, you can buy old NASA FORTRAN programs. Most of them do aerodynamic
calculations. If you really need to do that, that's a place to go. Export-
controlled; US citizens only.

[1]
[http://www.openchannelfoundation.org/cosmic/](http://www.openchannelfoundation.org/cosmic/)

------
nickpsecurity
Good that they have ROBUS-2 code on here. The real beauty is in the hardware.
Here's that project:

[http://shemesh.larc.nasa.gov/fm/spider/](http://shemesh.larc.nasa.gov/fm/spider/)

NASA's research on highly-assured systems has always been superb. Java
Pathfinder and their Formal Methods guidance were also useful.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Pathfinder](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Pathfinder)

[http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/1998022...](http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19980228002.pdf)

[http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/1998022...](http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19980227975.pdf)

[http://csrc.nist.gov/staff/Kuhn/kuhn-chandramouli-
butler-02....](http://csrc.nist.gov/staff/Kuhn/kuhn-chandramouli-
butler-02.pdf)

Those are the ones I recall off the top of my head. Glad we have new stuff to
look at. Hopefully at or above that level aside from the little tools that
just make our jobs easier.

------
tibu
It is interesting to see they are using Google Earth instead of some own map
system...

~~~
PavlovsCat
I find it a bit sad, I liked World Wind. This is too interesting and too
useful a type of application to have just one of it.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_World_Wind](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_World_Wind)

[http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/features.html](http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/features.html)

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zhs
I guess they never quite solved pagination.

~~~
erelde
At least I got some real fun with my free scroll wheel in another thing than
an excel spreadsheet or bad code.

------
stevenwu
Tangentially related, does anyone here use their APIs? I started playing
around with their Earth API
([https://api.nasa.gov/api.html#earth](https://api.nasa.gov/api.html#earth))
but ran into a bug that turns out to have been reported half a year ago.

[https://github.com/nasa/api-docs/issues/63](https://github.com/nasa/api-
docs/issues/63)

I sent an e-mail to their Contact Us mailbox with no reply. I'm kind of hoping
someone who works there sees this, because getting an image larger than the
default size would be really cool.

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iconjack
Why in God's name would they have "share on facebook" buttons?

~~~
bluejekyll
Obviously so that you share it on Facebook...

But seriously, why not, or what instead?

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jschwartzi
Has anyone used their network simulator? I'm wondering if it's higher-level
than the tools that are available in Linux. It's always useful to be able to
simulate different classes of network failure without actually having a crappy
network.

[https://github.com/nasa/channel-emulator](https://github.com/nasa/channel-
emulator)

------
iLemming
I was honestly hoping to see a few Lisp, Haskell or Erlang projects. Also it
seems NASA engineers are horrible in designing web-pages

~~~
0xmohit
> I was honestly hoping to see a few Lisp, Haskell or Erlang projects.

I've heard that NASA does a fair bit of NodeJS.

~~~
codygman
> NASA does a fair bit of NodeJS.

Scary. I hope that's limited to web stuff.

~~~
0xmohit
They use it for spacesuits. See "Spacesuits and Node.js - How open source will
change NASA" by their Director of Software Engineering [0]. Also, "One small
step for the Thinker: A case study of RethinkDB at NASA" [1].

[0] [https://vimeo.com/168064722](https://vimeo.com/168064722)

[1] [https://rethinkdb.com/blog/nasa-case-
study/](https://rethinkdb.com/blog/nasa-case-study/)

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lifeisstillgood
This could be awesome. NASA is held up as having ridiculously low bug counts
(probably for their launching actual rockets software) but I would love to add
this to a corpus stretching from the Linux kernel to whatever I wrote last
week and seeing what metrics can be pulled out

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thearn4
Their link to the OpenMDAO framework seems out of date

[https://github.com/OpenMDAO/OpenMDAO](https://github.com/OpenMDAO/OpenMDAO)

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kuharich
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3428836](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3428836)

------
saganus
Interesting that something like DTN is being hosted in SourceForge:

Interplanetary Overlay Network (ION) Software Distribution (DTN)
[http://sourceforge.net/projects/ion-
dtn/](http://sourceforge.net/projects/ion-dtn/)

I'm interested in DTN but given SF's reputation in the last few years I'm not
sure what to think of it :/

~~~
emilburzo
> [...] but given SF's reputation in the last few years I'm not sure what to
> think of it :/

It seems to be better since it's under new management[1].

[1] [https://sourceforge.net/blog/sourceforge-acquisition-and-
fut...](https://sourceforge.net/blog/sourceforge-acquisition-and-future-
plans/)

