Embracing Community Open Source Development Ray O’Brien August 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 August 17, 2011