Way to go NASA! This opens the door for a lot of possibilities. The more minds into a project, the better it can become. It cannot become stale, static.
On the other had, too many cooks in the kitchen results in everyone talking about food and no one cooking it.
From WiredNews:
Young Scientists Design Open-Source Program at NASA
Aaron RoweNASA scientists plan to announce a new open-source project this month called CosmosCode — it’s aimed at recruiting volunteers to write code for live space missions, Wired News has learned.
The program was launched quietly last year under NASA’s CoLab entrepreneur outreach program, created by Robert Schingler, 28, and Jessy Cowan-Sharp, 25, of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. Members of the CosmosCode group have been meeting in Second Life and will open the program to the public in the coming weeks, organizers said.
“CosmosCode is … allowing NASA scientists to begin a software project in the public domain, leveraging the true value of open-source software by creating an active community of volunteers,” said Cowan-Sharp, a NASA contractor.
CosmosCode is indicative of a larger shift at NASA toward openness and transparency — things for which complex and bureaucratic government labs are not known. The software project is part of CoLab, an effort to invite the public to help NASA scientists with various engineering problems. The space agency is also digging into its files from previous missions and releasing code that until now remained behind closed doors. Together, these projects are creating a sort of SourceForge for space.