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

Frederic Lardinois

05 Jan 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.

More to Come

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."

📝Google's surprise AI podcast hit

Google used to be a company where experimentation was encouraged -- or at least it felt like that from the outside. Now it's hard to remember when Google last launched a new product that was an immediate hit. But with NotebookLM and its AI podcasts, Google finally scored

🪧 Pressed words

I don't think anyone outside of Matt Mullenweg had the recent WordPress/WP Engine drama on their bingo card for this year. After a bit of early confusion, I think it's now clear that this is, in many ways, an extension of the open source discussions

🔒Now's the time to prepare for the post-quantum era

I've followed the development of quantum computing for the better part of the last decade. For the longest time, it's been "just around the corner" and with the advent of generative AI, any of the hype around the technology has receded into the background.

The week after CrowdStrike

It's been a week... Given everything that's happened lately, it's hard to believe that the CrowdStrike outages hit only a week ago. We're now deep in the clean-up phase of that particular disaster and while the blame for this particular incident falls

More to Come

Read more

📝Google's surprise AI podcast hit

🪧 Pressed words

🔒Now's the time to prepare for the post-quantum era

The week after CrowdStrike