Bruce,
Yeah, NASA (and other government agencies) have been promoting OSS for quite some time and some even have some long-standing projects, ref: WorldWind. And something worth noting, is that with the government, what they mean by OSS can sometimes be misleading. There is GOTS (Government Off The Shelf) OSS and non-GOTS OSS. Meaning, it could be regular OSS lib, but accessible only in a repository that is only accessible by government contractors / programs that have a need, and never really return code to the public domain (but do maintain changes). This is quite commonplace. I am not sure if that's what they mean in this case of the grant, specifically. NASAs WorldWind, has source repositories in the public domain and has for many years (I may be in the commit logs somewhere), so some definitely do work that way.
Projects like GDAL have benefited greatly from government / OSS integration. But then, you have situations like LAS Tools Right Now, where the main developer purportedly made some kind of a threat about adding malicious code to it, so gov agencies are asking everyone to immediately uninstall QGIS (open source GIS package, that utilizes las tools out of the box). I don't know if this has been validated but you can find bits and pieces around the net about it. Which brings me to my next point.
Sometimes, if you're working a government contract and you want to use a particular OSS library, they do not allow you to just download it and use it. You can however, purchase it through a trusted third-party company. All due to liability issues. As a result, you can literally burn, box and sell, literally Free software. The problem is, what if libtiff pokes a hole in the firewall every three image opens? And, don't laugh, i've seen weird stuff happen over the years. The funniest, was an API function to "create a folder" at a path, that, if the folder already exists, it would actually traverse the folder and delete all files / folders found underneath it. No joke. Now, due to some bad // \ path handling in the lib, when passed a path like this: C://something//and//some//place, it accidentally started wiping everything in the root of the C:/ drive. The first tool user that experienced that, was not a happy camper :-) The OSS path handling lib wasn't explicitly malicious, it was just bad path handling in the lib causing the problem, but bygons. Liability is a royal PITA.
Joseph Armbruster KJ4JIO
On Fri, Jul 17, 2020 at 2:18 PM Bruce Perens via AMSAT-BB amsat-bb@amsat.org wrote:
I am reading a NASA Grant application today, and noticed this text:
Program elements will give preference to proposals that include a plan for committing software as Open Source Software (OSS), beginning at the inception of the proposed work. This plan will include the identification of software components developed as part of the proposed work, and designate a permissive, widely accepted OSS license and a public repository hosting service for these components. _______________________________________________ Sent via AMSAT-BB@amsat.org. AMSAT-NA makes this open forum available to all interested persons worldwide without requiring membership. Opinions expressed are solely those of the author, and do not reflect the official views of AMSAT-NA. Not an AMSAT-NA member? Join now to support the amateur satellite program! Subscription settings: https://www.amsat.org/mailman/listinfo/amsat-bb