NASA Goes SourceForge 243
refactorator writes "We have a lift-off! The NASA Ames Research Center has open sourced Java PathFinder , a JVM that is an explicit state software model checker, all written in Java. For the first time, the complete master development site of a live NASA software engineering project is hosted on SourceForge. Read the official press release for details. The team around John Penix, Willem Visser, and Peter Mehlitz fought long and hard to get the development hosted outside of NASA, to enable true collaborative software development. Now show the government that it works - join the fray. May Java PathFinder boldly go where no NASA program has gone before." (Both Slashdot and SourceForge are part of VA Software.)
NASA has been on sourceforge before (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What The Hell Is That? (Score:3, Informative)
Or just look for "explicit state software model checking".
Not First App OS (Score:5, Informative)
http://opensource.arc.nasa.gov/ [nasa.gov]
Re:Why isn't more government stuff open source? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:This isn't possible is it? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Hmm... This is new. (Score:4, Informative)
The above clause is strictly optional and does not conflict with GPL in any way.
Re:Hmm... This is new. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Hmm... This is new. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Hmmmm (Score:5, Informative)
1. Most of the "management" apps are written by people who are not experts in the Java language, thus tend to fubar it pretty well. This is changing, but slowly.
2. Sun is aware of the remote X issues. This is something they are being slow about addressing, but I believe 1.5 should show a marked performance improvement.
3. P2P programs tend to eat a lot of system resources during operation. This doesn't have so much to do with Java as in the way they are designed.
4. The majority of "good" Java software is outside of the area of Desktop applications. Desktop is still an underdeveloped area for Java.
5. Java programs will always take more resources on a mainstream machine. This is due to the fact that the JVM replicates a lot of the functionality of the OS. In instances where the JVM *is* the OS (e.g. embedded development) the difference in resources is insignificant.
Here are a few examples of Java Desktop programs that do their job extremely well:
Azureus [sourceforge.net]
Wurm Online [wurmonline.com]
JGoodies JDiskReport [jgoodies.com]
DataDino Database Explorer [datadino.com]
A few games I wrote for a 4k contest. [dnsalias.com]
Re:It's not legal (Score:3, Informative)
That's not precisely true according what I read in the US Code [cornell.edu]. Work done by federal employees certainly can not be copyrighted, but work done by others can be assigned to the federal government. Of course the specifics of who did this work and whether it qualifies as a work of the government (ie how DID they get around this) are something I would like to see clearly explained
Re:Hmm... This is new. (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.opensource.org/licenses/nasa1.3.php