Open source is NASA's next frontier
New CTO lays out his vision for the future
The challenges to government's adoption and participation in open-source communities is often thought to be a simpe culture clash, but in reality it goes deeper than that, accordning to NASA's newly-appointed chief technology officer.
“The issues that we need to tackle are not only cuture, but beyond culture,” said Chris Kemp, formerly chief information officer at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. “And I think we need new policy and support from the administration and Congress to help us tackle" them.
Kemp spoke May 5 as part of panel at the Open Government & Innovations 2010 conference, held in Washington D.C. That was the same day that NASA announced his promotion to agency CTO, a new position created to foster information technology innovation within NASA. Kemp will oversee the agency's enterprise architecture division and be responsible for the introduction of new and emerging technologies into the agency's IT planning.
And open source is a key element of Kemp's strategy. “We're actually creating a new Open Source Office under our Open Government Initiative under the Chief Technology Officer's office,” he said. “We're really taking this seriously, and we've never had this sort of visibility and interest from headquarters before.”
Developing with open source is important to the government, Kemp said, because it helps the government have an influence over emerging standards and to push commercial software providers into supporting features that benefit the government.
“We see a close correlation between the areas of new development where standards do not really exist and open-source development,” Kemp told the OGI audience.“Open-source development allows the federal government to adopt emerging standards, and to create a reference platform from standards work that's going on at NIST and various other standards bodies that are being coordinated by NIST.”
One area where NASA has relied on open source for this particular reason is NASA Nebula, an open-source stack for cloud computing. “It would be far easier for us to take some commercial products and plug them into the stack, and then we'd have a hybrid stack of software,” Kemp said. “But there are a couple of different problems -- once you start incorporating commercial software into your stack, you then lose the ability to make modifications to make those pieces of the stack integrate with everything else. You also lose the ability, as standards begin to evolve, to kind of force the standards issue.”
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http://fcw.com/articles/2010/05/06/kemp-nasa-open-source.aspx
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