NASA Open Source Summit Proceedings Online

On March 29 & 30, NASA hosted its first Open Source Summit at Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. The event brought engineers and policy makers from across NASA together with well-respected members of the open source community together to discuss current challenges with NASA’s open source policy framework, and propose modifications that would make it easier for NASA to develop, release, and use open source software.

Open source brings numerous benefits to NASA software projects, including increased software quality, reduced development costs, faster development cycles, and reduced barriers to public-private collaboration through new opportunities to commercialize NASA technology. This inherently transparent, participatory, and collaborative approach is revolutionizing the way software is created, improved, and used.

Although open source release has already provided some of the potential benefits to NASA, the full benefits of open source can only be realized if NASA is able to establish the processes, policies, and culture needed to encourage and support open source development. This will require expanding open source activities beyond releasing software only after completion and finding new ways to support two-way collaboration with an open development community throughout the entire software lifecycle.

This document provides a snapshot of the activities during the Open Source Summit and summarizes the major issues and recommendations received not only from the in-person attendees, but also through the various online venues utilized during the event.

Download the full proceedings here.