NASA Releases Robotics Software, Almost

Posted 21 Jun 2007 at 04:15 UTC (updated 27 Jun 2007 at 23:16 UTC) by steve

A Slashdot article notes that NASA's JPL has released to the public their Coupled Layer Architecture for Robotic Autonomoy or CLARAty software. It was initially believed the software would be released under a Free Software or Open Source license, however this turned out not to be the case. The software was released under something called the "CLARAty Open Source License", which, despite the name, fails to meet either the FSF free software definition or the OSI Open Source definition. On the upside, the software can be downloaded at no cost, it's possible to view at least some of the source code, and use software in non-commercial applications. Any commercial use or derived works are not allowed, however. While the closed, proprietary license is disappointing, perhaps having access to the software will facilitate the development of similar functionality in free software.

NASA open source software, posted 21 Jun 2007 at 10:11 UTC by wedesoft » (Master)

To bad that it is not free software. However you can find a collection of open source NASA software on the NASA Ames center homepage. Most notably is maybe the NASA vision workbench. There also is a robotic simulation toolkit. Recently NASA has announced to create a open source hosting website.

Another good resource, posted 21 Jun 2007 at 13:16 UTC by steve » (Master)

The Open Channel Foundation is another great resource for finding public domain, open source, and free software that originates from government and educational institutions. They're officially "license neutral" and will list proprietary software like CLARAty as well, so you have to be careful but you can find some pretty cool things there.