7 ms·
NASA Open Source Software
- zhs 10y agoI guess they never quite solved pagination.
- erelde 10y agoAt least I got some real fun with my free scroll wheel in another thing than an excel spreadsheet or bad code.
- 0xmohit 10y agoIt feels sad to click a link that makes one's browser freeze. The link in question is a fine example.
- anc84 10y agoI was ready to ask you about details and then my Firefox on i7 froze as well. What a horrible website, it makes gazillions requests to github simultaneously. Perfect example of Javascript abuse worthy a simple static page to me.
- J_Darnley 10y agoAh, so I won't bother allowing js then if it's going to crash my browser. Thanks for the heads up you two.
- vonklaus 10y agoublock block count is 94 on my machine. Seems pretty high for a .gov site.
- wang_li 10y agoI 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_the_U.S._government https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_work_by_th...
- cdibona 10y agoThis 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 10y agoAny 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.
- cdibona 10y agoTo be clear: I didn't release the nasa code, I went to a couple of meetings there, but they did all the work. I just eval licenses all the time as part of my job, like some kind of weirdo.
- Haydos585x2 10y agoI imagine the argument is probably that you're not paying for the source code you're paying for the solution.
- bigredhdl 10y agoThis 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.
- lifeisstillgood 10y agoThis 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
- saganus 10y agoInteresting 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 10y ago> [...] 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-future-plans/ https://sourceforge.net/blog/sourceforge-acquisition-and-fut...
- jschwartzi 10y agoHas 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
- thearn4 10y agoTheir link to the OpenMDAO framework seems out of date https://github.com/OpenMDAO/OpenMDAO https://github.com/OpenMDAO/OpenMDAO
- tibu 10y agoIt is interesting to see they are using Google Earth instead of some own map system...
- PavlovsCat 10y agoI 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
- iLemming 10y agoI was honestly hoping to see a few Lisp, Haskell or Erlang projects. Also it seems NASA engineers are horrible in designing web-pages
- firewalkwithme 10y ago:) hehe - I expected great content and was extra forgiving when waiting for the load to finish. Gave up after 120 seconds and 3 promps to kill the js, never seen my browser behave like this ever
- 0xmohit 10y ago> 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 10y ago> NASA does a fair bit of NodeJS. Scary. I hope that's limited to web stuff.
- 0xmohit 10y agoThey 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/
- Animats 10y agoThis 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/
- kuharich 10y agoPrevious discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3428836 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3428836
- iconjack 10y agoWhy in God's name would they have "share on facebook" buttons?
- bluejekyll 10y agoObviously so that you share it on Facebook... But seriously, why not, or what instead?
- unethical_ban 10y agoIf only they had a "share on Hacker News" button, it would have made someone's life easier.
- chrisatumd 10y agoI 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 10y agoWhy is it hard to open source things?
- fma 10y agoLiability. 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.
- cyphar 10y ago> but if I use Oracle I can get support and in extreme case sue for damages. That's not true. Most proprietary software licenses have the "not suitable for purpose" warranty clause that basically means that you can't sue them if their database crashes on you. Oh, and you can get support for free software from many different companies (SUSE and RedHat being two).
- mcbits 10y agoThat sounds like the opposite problem from releasing open source code. I would imagine one of NASA's concerns is ensuring none of the code reveals classified information. Another risk (this one for anyone thinking about publishing their code) is that it turns out to infringe on some obscure patent - though I'm not sure if it would be easier or harder to get a settlement from NASA than a private business. (So yes, "Liability." is still a possible reason.)
- nickpsecurity 10y agoGood 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/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://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/1998022... http://csrc.nist.gov/staff/Kuhn/kuhn-chandramouli-butler-02.pdf http://csrc.nist.gov/staff/Kuhn/kuhn-chandramouli-butler-02.... 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.
- 323454 10y agoWoah! 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 10y agoSomebody needs to connect this to KSP
- stevenwu 10y agoTangentially 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.