

New Catalog Brings NASA Software Down to Earth - ademarre
http://www.nasa.gov/press/2014/april/new-catalog-brings-nasa-software-down-to-earth

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mindcrime
Well... on the plus side, there _is_ some good stuff here, and a few "good
things" that are Open Source.

But I have to say, I'm largely underwhelmed. _Not_ mind you, by the software
itself. But by the fact that the vast majority of this stuff appears under the
category of "Government Purpose Release", which, if I'm interpreting this
correctly, means you can only use it in service of the US government. And
another chunk is "US release only" which pretty much sucks, because it's still
not open source, and a restriction like that makes the software fairly
useless.

For those of us in the US (and erg, whose tax dollars funded this stuff) it's
pretty disappointing to me, to see how much of their software is still locked
down and inaccessible. I mean, putting it in a nice pretty catalog is nice and
all, but why tease me with something I can't get my hands on, hack on, use,
and redistribute?

I also don't understand doing an actual _catalog_ as a PDF, as opposed to a
web-based, searchable catalog where you can search by keyword, license, etc.

Oh well, Growler looks kinda cool, and I wouldn't have known about that
otherwise.
[http://people.nas.nasa.gov/~bgreen/growler/](http://people.nas.nasa.gov/~bgreen/growler/)

