NASA Set to Host Open Source Summit

One of the leading scientific agencies in the United States, if not the world, clearly values open source software. WebProNews reported on their partnership with RackSpace in July 2010 seeking to expand upon RackSpace’s technology used for cloud hosting and computing, and now NASA has announced they will be hosting an Open Source Summit on March 29th and 30th. The Summit, to be held at Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, will seek to bring together leading engineers and developers from NASA with key figures in the open source community. NASA hopes that a standard can be created that will facilitate more of NASA’s work to be open sourced, as well as streamlining implementation of open source into NASA.

Although it is unlikely that any significant changes with immediate impact will arise from this conference, it is a positive sign of open source’s relevance and importance looking forward. NASA acknowledges that it already takes advantage of and contributes to the open source community. However, they seek to improve upon the processes involved to increase adoption and contribution of open source software. These processes and standards arising from NASA’s Summit could easily impact other major agencies and companies use of open source. Many companies that utilize open source code utilize a liaison that implement and improve upon the open source technologies available. Segments of code are later released back into the open source community if and when they no longer provide a competitive advantage to that company. Although the delayed release of valuable code additions is likely to never cease with a for-profit company, a larger adoption by not-for-profit companies and agencies would certainly boost the value of the open source technologies utilized. This could easily be a reality with NASA and the open source community working out a good standard to do so.

For more information, check out the NASA Open Source Summit website.