Open Source Summit Promotes Collaboration among Engineers

On March the 29th and 30th, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration will be the host at a summit bringing engineers together to talk about open source software development. The event will take place at the Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.
This is the first such summit by the nation’s space science research leader. The concept of open source, in many instances, has led to innovation and enhanced software development at a rate that could never be accomplished by a single entity and its developers acting alone. One recent example of the power of open source development is the App Store for the Apple iPhone and iPad. In the few short years since its inception, over a million software applications have been developed by amateur and professional software developers in the general public for the innovative devices.
NASA hopes that through the summit, they will be able determine the extent to which the agency will be able to tap into the power of open source development, and develop some best practices to make that a reality.
“Open source brings numerous benefits to NASA software projects, including increased quality, reduced development costs, faster development cycles and reduced barriers for public-private collaboration to commercialize agency technology” said NASA’s Chief Technology Officer for Information Technology Chris C. Kemp. “The full benefits of open source can only be achieved if NASA is able to establish the processes, policies and culture needed to encourage and support open source development.”
Some of the speakers scheduled for the summit are Pascal Finette, director of Mozilla Labs; Robert Sutor, vice president of Open Systems at IBM; Chris Wanstrath, CEO and co-founder of Github; and Brian Stevens, CTO and vice president of Worldwide Engineering at Red Hat.