NASA requests help finding gov't use of standard OSS licenses.

[Ben Tilly]

This year the white house released IT Dashboard under the GPL:
http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/03/white-house-it-dashboard-open-source.html.

See http://cio-nii.defense.gov/sites/oss/Open_Source_Software_(OSS)_FAQ.htm#Releasing_software_as_OSS
for a list of more software.  If you're not aware of it, the rest of
that FAQ may prove useful.

>From the point of view of NASA, rather than worrying about which
license is most popular, I'd suggest that you think through your goals
and then pick a license that fits that.

If you're OK with letting businesses take useful software that you
release, enhancing it, and then trying to sell it (possibly back to
you), then you should use a permissive license, like the MIT.

If you would like to reduce the ability of private companies to sell
your hard work, consider something like the GPL or even the Affero
GPL.  (The second one tries to extend the GPL model to websites.)

On Sun, May 1, 2011 at 7:10 PM, Karl Fogel <kfogel at red-bean.com> wrote:
> Robin 'Roblimo' Miller <robin at roblimo.com> writes:
>>Karl Fogel wrote:
>>odwin, CIO of NASA's Space Operations Mission Directorate, is
>>> looking for examples of federal agencies releasing open source software
>>> under standard OSS licenses -- like BSD, Apache, GNU GPL, etc.
>>
>>Security-Enhanced Linux (- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SE_Linux -)
>>was written by NSA employees and released under the GPL was back in
>>2000.
>
> Thanks!  I had a look at Scott's spreadsheet and it was already there
> (good).  But keep 'em coming, keep 'em coming...
>
> -Karl
>