embracing community open source development ray o’brien august 17, 2011
TRANSCRIPT
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