NASA Stennis Releases First Open-Source Software

https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/stennis/stennis-first-open-source-software/

26•mindcrime•1d ago

Comments

djoldman•4h ago

Interesting license:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nasa/NDAS/refs/heads/main/...

mindcrime•3h ago

Indeed. My subjective perception is that NASA don't use that as much as they used to. But at least it is OSD compliant[1], and not some weird, janky "sort of Open Source but not really" license.

[1]: https://opensource.org/license/nasa1-3-php

sam_bristow•11m ago

NOSA is an absolute pain to deal with. In particular requirement that all changes be your "original creation" has scuttled a number of efforts to integrate projects into the wider ecosystem.

skissane•2h ago

I wonder how the NASA copyright works given this general legal rule that US federal government works are automatically in the public domain.

I know that rule has various exceptions, but I’m left wondering exactly which of those exceptions applies in this case.

d42muna•1h ago

There are efforts within NASA to kill NOSA. The lawyers are the ones who insist on it.

gitroom•3h ago

good to see nasa keeping it open - kinda wish theyd do this more often tbh. you think old habits or just red tape stop em from going all in?

jamesmontalvo3•2h ago

Just to be clear this is one center’s first open source release. There’s open source from other centers at https://github.com/nasa and https://code.nasa.gov/

d42muna•2h ago

Red tape. So much red tape. It can take literally years to get permission to release code as open source within NASA. It's not the scientists - they want to release their code. It's the lawyers.

jamesmontalvo3•1h ago

Concur that it takes time (it took 2.5-3 years for me to open source github/nasa/coda), but in my experience at JSC it wasn’t red tape, but a lack of staffing in the export office. It seems reasonable to me that some amount of review be performed before something can be open sourced, and the effort wasn’t too much on my end. It just took a long time.

WillAdams•3h ago

I've always wished that the Open Vehicle Sketchpad:

https://software.nasa.gov/software/LAR-17491-1

had become more popular and morphed into a general-purpose CAD program....

az09mugen•3h ago

According to the readme https://github.com/nasa/NDAS, the pre-requisite are

<pre><code> LabVIEW 2020+ Windows 10+ Git And tortoise git (for its embedded diff tool) </code></pre>I'm a big fan of tortoise and mainly its revision graph. I must say their 3-way merge tool is the best free software on Windows the only competing one, but less good, is p4merge, and it's closed source.

Also Tortoise is one of the big reasons I did not switch to MacOS at work (yes, the revision graph, and no, there are no almost-as-good-or-better alternative on Linux/MacOS, but please prove me wrong) .

TIL about LabVIEW and the G programming language. Also it breaks my mental image of NASA people working on Linux or MacOS.

rekenaut•2h ago

LabVIEW is really fantastic because it’s really easy to throw lab software together in a few hours or days and just get hardware test stands off the ground, especially when you don’t have a SWE in your department and you have an engineer who just wants to get it working and doesn’t want to get bogged down in code. It’s also pretty easy to make changes to even if you have limited software dev experience. Sure, there are many projects where you really want to have the flexibility of traditional programming languages and have actual SWEs work on it, and the proprietary license is annoying, but it makes a lot of sense when you see non-SWE engineers and techs working with it on the lab floor.

Edit: By the way I’m aware that there are LabVIEW specific SWEs as mentioned in the article who are able to do wizardry with it, but I wanted to highlight its usability beyond that.

Animats•1h ago

This is not NASA's first open source software. NASA has released open source software for years.[1] This is just something NASA's Stennis Center is doing.

[1] https://software.nasa.gov/

kfarr•49m ago

My favorite NASA open source project: https://github.com/NASA-AMMOS/3DTilesRendererJS

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