With Government budget cuts, grounded shuttles and a nation who is no longer interested in any kind of “space race,” instead of turning tail and run, NASA went “open.”
Just this past week, NASA launched code.nasa.gov, the latest member of the open NASA web family.
That’s right, web family.
Through code.NASA, they will continue to unify, and expand NASA’s open source activities. The site will serve to bring existing projects to light, provide a forum to discuss projects and processes, and guide internal and external groups in open development, release, and contribution.
This also includes NASA’s Nebula Cloud Computing Platform.
Nebula is an open-source cloud computing platform that was developed to provide an easily quantifiable and improved alternative to building additional expensive data centers and to provide an easier way for NASA scientists and researchers to share large, complex data sets with external partners and the public.
Phase I
NASA will focus on providing a home for the current state of open source at the Agency.
This includes guidance on how to engage the open source process, points of contact, and a directory of existing projects. By elucidating the process, we hope to lower the barriers to building open technology in partnership with the public.
Phase II
Phase two will concentrate on providing a robust forum for ongoing discussion of open source concepts, policies, and projects at the Agency.
Phase III
Use tools and mechanisms development projects generally need to be successful, such as distributed version control, issue tracking, continuous integration, documentation, communication, and planning/management. The also plan to create and host a tool, service, and process chain to further lower the burden to “going open.”
Finally
Ultimately, our goal is to create a highly visible community hub that will imbue open concepts into the formulation stages of new hardware and software projects, and help existing projects transition to open modes of development and operation.
NASA believes that tomorrow’s space and science systems will be built in the open, and their code.nasa.gov will play a vital role in the process.
Will your code someday escape our solar system or land on an alien planet?
You can learn more on the code.NASA website.
Should Church technology follow suite?
Is open source the answer?
Raoul Snyman says
Do I really need to say that I think the answer is “Yes”? 😀
In reality, NASA has been doing the open source thing for ages. I think they’re just expanding it now to encompass as much as possible.
Open source software is taking over, no matter what people think or want to believe. It’s not a huge fast revolution, it’s a revolution of necessity. Companies are turning to open source because it makes business sense. It costs less, the ROI is higher, and the skills are becoming easier and easier to find. If you want to use the cloud, in most instances you have to use OSS. Various studies have shown that companies are eagerly looking into OSS.
A lot of the companies that used to have their own IDE (integrated development environments) for development around their products are now using Eclipse, an open source IDE, with their own plugins.
There are also plenty of companies that have built their success around open source software. Red Hat, the biggest server software company, is built around Linux; MySQL AB (before they were bought out by Sun, and then Oracle) was built around the open source MySQL database server; Google would not be where they are today if it were not for OSS. Facebook, WordPress, and so many more, were all built with OSS.
Remember, over 90% of software developed world wide is bespoke in-house software. The commercial software you see on the shelves is less than a tenth of the software that is developed.
So should the church be using (and producing) OSS where possible? An absolute yes! I think it fits in with Christ’s message so well. Open source is about community just as much as it is about software, and Christ was all about community as well (just look at the book of Acts for examples of Christian community).
sdesocio says
At one point Mars Hill was going to give the City away, then Zondervan made them a major offer so they sold it instead… that was a bummer. I think that there will always be a need for groups to purchase products, but at the same time maybe the church should move in that direction. Though I think they already are.
Eric Dye says
I think you’re right. In fact, perhaps a mix is best — some open source, others not. It seems like we could use some more, though 😉