NASA Launches 'Open-Source Science Initiative', Urges Adoption of Open Science

In a keynote at FOSDEM 2023, NASA's science data officer Steve Crawford explored NASA's use of open-source software.

But LWN.net notes that the talk went far beyond just the calibration software for the James Webb Space Telescope and the Mars Ingenuity copter's flight-control framework.

In his talk, Crawford presented
NASA's Open-Source
Science Initiative. Its goal is to support scientists to help them
integrate open-science principles into the entire research workflow. Just a
few weeks before Crawford's talk, NASA's Science Mission Directorate
published its new
policy on scientific information.

Crawford summarized this policy with 'as open as possible, as restricted
as necessary, always secure', and he made this more concrete: 'Publications
should be made openly available with no embargo period, including research
data and software. Data should be released with a Creative Commons Zero
license, and software with a commonly used permissive license, such as
Apache, BSD, or MIT. The new policy also encourages using and contributing
to open-source software.' Crawford added that NASA's policies will be
updated to make it clear that employees can contribute to open-source
projects in their official capacity....

As part of its Open-Source Science Initiative, NASA has started its
five-year Transform
to Open Science (TOPS) mission. This is a $40-million mission to speed
up adoption of open-science practices; it starts with the White House and
all major US federal agencies, including NASA, declaring 2023 as the 'Year of Open Science'. One of NASA's
strategic goals with TOPS is to enable five major scientific discoveries
through open-science principles, Crawford said.

Interesting tidbit from the article: 'In 2003 NASA created a license to enable the release of software by civil servants, the NASA Open
Source Agreement. This license
has been approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI), but the Free Software Foundation doesn't consider
it a free-software license because it does not allow changes to the code that come from third-party free-software projects.'

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