Embracing Community Open Source Development

Ray O’BrienAugust 17, 2011

Embracing Community Open Source Development -- from the Perspective of a Project Manager

The Situation and Timing The Vision The Team The Environment (location, hours, the chairs) The Connections and the “Community” The Challenges The Rewards Take-Aways

Embracing Open Source--1--August 17, 2011

Immersion Training – Learning about Community Open Source Development via Fire Hose: Terminology Methodology Tools Licensing Governance models Governing NASA policy and regulations NASA software release approval process

Embracing Open Source--2--August 17, 2011

The Challenges Learning that the existing NASA Open Source Agreement,

NOSA, would likely hinder adoption by the targeted community of users and developers

Pursuit of a waiver to release Nebula under an Apache 2.0 license

Learning that the existing NASA software release policy did not address community open source development

Pursuit of a waiver to allow Nebula to engage in community open source development

Embracing Open Source--3--August 17, 2011

The Challenges (Cont’d)

Explaining:»Why the Nebula team wants to “release” software that is not

yet complete outside of NASA»Why individuals not affiliated with NASA would want to help

finish NASA’s incomplete software & why NASA would want to help others complete theirs

»Why some parts of the NASA Software Engineering Procedural Requirements don’t map directly to community-based development processes (and best way to address)

Embracing Open Source--4--August 17, 2011

The Challenges (Cont’d) Interpreting and understanding the concerns raised regarding

Intellectual Property Making the case that assessments for software release

approval could be performed from pre-defined software development scope documents

Convincing a very motivated development team to be patient while we worked through the NASA software release approval process

Embracing Open Source--5--August 17, 2011

Ahh, But The Rewards Turns out, the vision of a full community developed open

source cloud solution was also shared by many outside of NASA

In July of 2010, NASA, together with Rackspace, provided the foundational components for Openstack

Since that time, Openstack has become one of the fastest growing open source cloud projects

The supporting community is in the drivers seat in developing the roadmap and is already influencing the direction of cloud

Embracing Open Source--6--August 17, 2011

Rewards (Cont’d) NASA was able eliminate a significant Nebula development

effort targeted at delivering object storage capability NASA will be able to significantly reduce its Nebula

development much earlier than planned NASA will be able to focus its reduced Nebula development

effort on differentiating features and capabilities that may be of value only to the Agency

NASA continues to receive very good public recognition as a leader in the development of cloud computing capabilities

Embracing Open Source--7--August 17, 2011

Moving Forward Interactions with others within NASA led to the finding that

others had considered community open source development projects but had chosen not to pursue this approach due to policy challenges

The challenges described and the finding spawned NASA’s first Open Source Summit last March

The discussions and input will be used to influence the development of revised or new licensing and policy enabling community open source development

Embracing Open Source--8--August 17, 2011

Take-Aways For certain projects, NASA’s involvement in community open

source development, either as a project lead or contributor, could be a great fit

In the future, the path will likely be smoother for other projects Community open source development provides a great

vehicle for public-private collaboration and directly supports the Opengov tenets of transparency, collaboration, and participation

Inspired development communities can build great things and participation can be very rewarding

Embracing Open Source--9--August 17, 2011