NASA Launches Code.Nasa.Gov to Show Off its Open Source Projects

Frederic Lardinois

Jan 5, 2012 — 1 min read

NASA today launched a dedicated site for showing off its work around open source software. You're not going to find the software that drives NASA's rockets and satellites here, but the agency hopes that the "site will serve to surface existing projects, provide a forum for discussing projects and processes, and guide internal and external groups in open development, release, and contribution." Among the projects featured on the site already are libraries for image processing and computer vision, a framework for design analysis and optimization and World Wind, NASA's pre-Google Earth 3D interactive world viewer. Quite a few other projects are still "coming soon." The agency is hosting the code on GitHub, the increasingly popular service for managing source code in the cloud.

Besides showcasing its open source credentials, NASA obviously also hopes to draw attention from developers to these projects.

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It's worth noting that NASA stresses that this is just the first phase of the code.nasa.gov launch. The agency also plans to set up a forum for discussing these projects and general "open source concepts, policies, and projects at the Agency." NASA also plans to "create and host a tool, service, and process chain to further lower the burden to going open."

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