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.)
How... (Score:1, Insightful)
Great Boost for Java (Score:3, Insightful)
Kudos, NASA!!
Why isn't more government stuff open source? (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't get me wrong, this is a great feat by NASA-Ames, but it's something I already expect as a taxpayer...
Re:Hmmmm (Score:3, Insightful)
the code before shoting the thing into space.
OSS dont mean,
First SF for NASA, maybe; first OS, no (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Hmmmm (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's say this java thingie miscalculates some data because it incorrectly interprets input as being in metric units, when in fact it's in imperial units.
"It could never happen!" I can hear all of you saying.
Well, it could, it can and it did.
Maybe if there had been x-thousand eyes looking at the code, it might have been caught by someone.
Bottom line, mistakes happen, but in open-source, you lower the percent of them.
commercial use of government software (Score:3, Insightful)
I seem to recall that the reason they didn't release government-developed projects as open-source was because of prohibitions on commercial use of government software.
Basicallly, they didn't want a government agency to be making software (using your tax bucks) for the profit of someone else.
Before you say "corporations pay taxes too", let me remind you that corporate tax share has gone from about 50% in the 1950's, to about 2% today. Yep- the individual foots 98% of the government budget, but corporations get all the laws.
Re:Hmmmm (Score:3, Insightful)
I find the idea of attributing liability inane.
Finding the cause is all-important, because you want to prevent recurrence of disaster, and that's what the extra eyes are for, but as for liability, I expect it's like someone already posted; the final word goes to the people at NASA that launch the sucker, they have to do final validation tests.
Re:Hmmmm (Score:2, Insightful)
responsibility (Score:5, Insightful)
With NASA, for not validating/testing a solution enough, just as it would be my responsibility if I implemented a half-assed piece of software into a corporate environment without adequate testing. If NASA went down to the hardware store and bought a garden hose valve for a rocket fuel tank, slapped it on the night of a launch and it failed and sent a rocket into the drink- would you blame the garden hose valve maker? Course not. We like to point fingers all the time at things other than our decision-making process.
I help volunteer for a car club which teaches high performance driving at various racetracks. A lot of stuff becomes Really Important when you're driving close to the limits of your talent and the vehicle's equipment. Stuff does go wrong, although it's statistically very rare for there to be an incident caused by mechanical failure. Much of the time, it's driver error.
For example, a wheel falls off. The driver says "I crashed because my wheel fell off." No. The driver crashed because the driver forgot to check lug bolt torque, and the wheel came off because the torque on the lug bolts wasn't correct. A more complex example: "I crashed because my brakes failed". No. The driver crashed because the lap before he crashed, the driver didn't realize his brake pedal was getting really spongy- or worse, he did realize it, and didn't do anything about it (ie, he didn't pit in and bleed the brakes because he wanted to stay out on track).
Re:w00t, FP (maybe) (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Hmmmm (Score:4, Insightful)
it's not rocket sci...er um, yeah.
Re:If thats your "bigger question" (Score:3, Insightful)
Just because anybody CAN work on code and deal with bugs, doesn't mean anybody WILL. There is no evidence that bugs in any given OS projects are 'instantly' removed.
As for accountability? Why do we always have to have some poor soul to point the finger at? why do we have to make any one person in particular accountable?
Because if you are going to use a product for any serious use it is customary to look for guarantees that the product is fit for use. Some open source projects have sufficient reputation that they they are trusted in most areas without any such legal or commercial guarantees (such as the Linux kernel). OS in itself is no guarantee of quality.
Would you leap into and drive a free car built by someone you don't know just because they are willing to show you the blueprints and parts list?
If the project fails then we have ALL failed, and, friend, the accountability will be found in the fact that we WILL improve upon the code, we WILL learn from our mistakes, and we WILL prove that Open Source (free) software IS the best way to spend tax payers money when it comes to computer programming
The key to the best way to produce software is to have skilled and motivated developers. The Open Source-ness is not always relevant.
Larry Wall developed Perl at NASA (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Oh man, I needed that. (Score:5, Insightful)
BWHAHAHAHAHA!!!
Oh, man. I needed a good laugh today.
Aside from the compulsory Slashdot Java FUD, it's really not a joke. Java has a big advantage in that the the bytes codes produced can be verified, and so the program tested, without any concerns of the final deployment platform. This is a major advantage for an organisation like NASA which most likely has a wide range of hardware on which software is deployed.
Re:Hmmmm (Score:3, Insightful)
It's simple really. If Company X uses open source software with its disclaimer of liability and something goes wrong, its nobody's fault but X's. If Company X goes with Microsoft software with its disclaimer of liability, its still nobody's fault but X's.
While it'd be interesting to see if liability disclaimers hold up in court, I'd rather it be with Microsoft as the defendant, personally.
Re:w00t, FP (maybe) (Score:2, Insightful)
Sorry to deillusion you, but in this case the only benefits will be PR and, maybe HR, nothing too technical, specially not "to enable true collaborative software development" which, in this case, just can't happen.
This software, even if it is not directly involved with something launched to space (it's a code validator) it is still a political issue (as anything related to the space race) and that means there can't be "real" collaborative software development as in "hey, Ax0R, your last three patches are good enough, so I'll give you a write-allowed account to the repo for you to directly check in your code", and then just checkout and build. No: every code will have to be scrutinized by NASA people and then, if accepted, checked in to the *real* source code repository well protected within NASA facilities so, for practical purpouses, the public repo will be a "read only" one.
"True collaboration" is all about mutual confidence, and this cannot be grown at a NASA project, no matter SF or not.
Re:Great Boost for Java (Score:4, Insightful)
Why do I hate it? It is a language that builds in bureaucracy, making you say everything three or four times, static this, static that, hard-coded the other, if there's a fun or useful feature it's not there ("generics" are about 5 years too late and from my reading still amazingly weak compared to most other languages, and that's just one of the fun features I have in mind) after programming in a language like Python or Ruby it's like programming with handcuffs and concrete galoshes, complete with the sinking feelings the latter can cause and subsequent project death.
(We didn't used to need IDEs that did half to three-quarters of your typing for you (and I mean keyboard typing), and most languages still manage to live without it. That says something. (I'm also somewhat amazed at the Java community's ability both to have strong namespaces like org.slashdot.something.web, and still name classes with 40 or 50 characters, like WebPageToMirrorDeciderBooleanHelperInterface.))
But there are times that is called for, and NASA development epitomizes that. My personal feeling is that it is called for far, far, far less often than conventional wisdom says it is, but the call is certainly not zero.
All those features I'm bitching about missing above, including but not limited to things like closures, any sort of continuation support, metaclasses, "duck" typing like Python or Ruby, support for "eval"ing strings as if they were source code (which I've used precisely once in the last five years; I'm not saying this is something that should be used a lot), all kinds of things like that, are bad for an state checker, as it really complicates the space and makes it hard to tell what will happen when without actually running the code, which for various reasons is also not a practical solution to state checking.
There may be slightly better languages (ada?), but all in all Java is a good choice for NASA, for the very reasons that I hate it.
Re:Oh man, I needed that. (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm sorry, but you've got to be fucking kidding me.
NASA knows explicitly what the final deployment platform will look like, from hardware up to OS and available software binaries. It's part of the all-encompassing and overwhelming specification process used when creating a new government (well, NASA/military) project.
For what NASA is doing, what they need is a language that is well-understood (Ada most definitely is), and Java doesn't fall into that category yet...C++, maybe, but not Java.
It's not legal (Score:3, Insightful)
Copyright (C) 2005 United States Government as represented by the
Administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration
(NASA). All Rights Reserved.
The above statement from the license is not legal.
By defn all copyrightable materials produced by the feds are Public Domain... in the most legal sense of the phrase.
Someone at NASA wasn't paying attention.
Furthermore, since the copyleft principle relies on Copyright to grant certain permissions, the fact that the Feds can't hold copyright means that they can't use "traditional" open source licenses.
That's why you don't see this whole flood of OSS from the feds.