From time to time I give talks, often to government folks or folks that do business with government, about open source licenses and building communities across industry boundaries. A number of years ago NASA blazed new trails for the US federal government when they submitted their custom open source license and was successful in having it added to the list of OSI approved licenses, were it remains today.
Over the last several years NASA has asked for advice about its license, which many in the industry and community have suggested limits participation outside of government in a long and valuable list of projects. In 2011 and 2012 NASA was encouraged, cajoled, nudged and knocked over the head with power point slides suggesting they would be much better off landing on widely accepted license.
Because it comes up often, and I keep loosing track of the best details, I’m parking a copy the NASA 2011 Open Source Summit Proceedings here were I can find them. This was a highly successful gathering of NASA staff, community leaders, and industry experts (hats off to Linda Curaton and Scott Goodwin as exec sponsors of the meeting). The summit format included a number of “focus groups” tackling NASA’s top questions. Issue #2: Licensing (Page 6) includes concrete recommendations for the agency. Enjoy.
You can read much more about NASA’s work on open source at OpenNasa.gov
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