DARPA Publishes Tons of Open Source Code, Data 39
An anonymous reader sends this news from The Verge:
"The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, sponsors a lot of technology through grants to universities and private labs, with projects running the gamut from robots to electroencephalography caps, to software and new programming languages. A lot of that knowledge is open source, but it hasn't always been easy to access. Today, DARPA has responded to requests from the research and development community by publishing the DARPA Open Catalog, a website that aggregates source code and other data for all public DARPA-funded projects."
Chris White, DARPA program manager, said, "Making our open source catalog available increases the number of experts who can help quickly develop relevant software for the government. Our hope is that the computer science community will test and evaluate elements of our software and afterward adopt them as either standalone offerings or as components of their products."
Re:Mass (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes [stackexchange.com], although it's a pretty stupid unit to use for the numbers involved.
Re: Mass (Score:1)
Of course, when printed.
Re:Mass (Score:5, Funny)
If it's coming from the government, it's usually measured in shit-tons.
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And kilo and mega tons. Its the 'bama.
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Can source code be measured in tons?
Is that Metric or Imperial? We wouldn't want to mess up the conversion....
Stuxnet (Score:5, Funny)
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Good start!! (Score:5, Interesting)
This is a good start. If "we the people" pay to develop software, then it makes sense to ensure that "we the people" can use it, improve it, and distribute those improvements by default. See http://freethecode.org/ [freethecode.org] for others who think that makes sense too.
The URL http://www.dwheeler.com/govern... [dwheeler.com] has a longer list of software released by US governments (federal, state, or local) as open source software. It even identifies a few meta-lists like this one. I'm sure it's incomplete, but it shows that US governments do release open source software. I'd love to hear of other examples of such software (with URLs that prove that the government paid to develop or improve it).
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I work for the Government (and read Slashdot during work). We host everything that works at:
www.gifttutoring.org
Also, the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) has a HUGE OSS presence: http://www.adlnet.org/ [adlnet.org]
Previous projects have contributed to randomization routine, open source oceanographic models, and robotic interactions (Player/Stage).
Re: Crushed by Free Candy Saga II - Taking the Bab (Score:1)
Any code can have backdoors. Any open-source code can be checked in the same way for backdoors. So what's the difference?
What is this, a quote from Captain Picard? (Score:3)
DARPA Publishes Tons of Open Source Code, Data
Why does everything think it's so cool to use a comma instead of the word "and" in a headline? Does the printed media even still do it?
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Personally I think & should be saved for true pairings: Morecambe & Wise, Penn & Teller, fish & chips.
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DARPA Publishes Tons of Open Source Code, Data
Why does everything think it's so cool to use a comma instead of the word "and" in a headline? Does the printed media even still do it?
They save a total of one space over the ampersand even; pretty soon it'll become common practice I bet.
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Why not go the whole hog and use a +? Another two spaces saved!
Ooh, I know, any word containing the sequence "ate" could have it replaced with "8."
I should shut up...
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Another two spaces saved!
Duh, one.
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Without sarcasm, for once... (Score:2)
Public domain? (Score:2)
I seriously don't get how this is possible. Weren't we all told that works by the federal government automatically fall into the public domain (except classified works) since the federal government *can't* hold copyrights? How is having a university create the work with federal money any different from the feds doing it themselves? (It would be a "work for hire" if it *were* copyrightable.) And the whole concept of copyleft licenses depends on copyrights, ironically, so you can't release something under
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If the government sponsors a research of yours, you still get the credit and aknowledgement. Should work the same with any kind of project, I guess?
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Code written by government employees on government time can't be copyrighted (there is an issue for SELinux here, where some new files had GPL headers slapped on them and can't actually be GPL'd because they were written by NSA employees). This is code written by people on DARPA-funded grants working in universities and private companies, so that rule doesn't apply.
I'm currently funded on a DARPA grant, and we release most of our code under BSD or Apache licenses (quite a bit of it is already rolled bac