The level of scrutiny to get an approval to release any meaningful part of the Shuttle flight software would be almost insuperable. "Open-sourcing it" is utter

The level of scrutiny to get an approval to release any meaningful part of the Shuttle flight software would be almost insuperable. "Open-sourcing it" is utterly out of the question. However, this is not because there is secret communications tech on board. It's because any "space-based technology" is covered by ITAR, and the US government has signaled (in the case I referenced, and others) that the gloves are off. It's not just fining the companies concerned, it's filing criminal charges against the involved individuals. This has been true for some years now, and the crystallizing event was the Intelsat incident above, which caused a multifaceted furor that resists summarization. A case in point. I worked on a project to analyze ISS (space station) engineering data. We needed to look at the currents flowing through a motor on ISS that controls orientation of the solar panels. For publications released in the open literature, we were not allowed to label the axes on any of these motor currents. We were not allowed to have foreign nationals (such as, say, a Canadian grad student) working on the project. The point being, any information about space-based systems is covered by ITAR, and the standard of scrutiny is very high.