While budgetary constraints and increasing commercial competition has clearly taken its toll on NASA, one area where the iconic government institution has unquestionably made headway is the implementation of open source.
The launching of code.NASA a few months back was an excellent start, open sourcing various pieces of NASA software so that anyone in the world could adapt and improve it. But as you might expect, many of NASA’s internal software projects are heavily tailored to their specific goals and operations; so with only a few exceptions, the software NASA open sourced was not of much use to the average person.
Space Apps Challenge
In an effort to address that shortcoming, NASA launched the ???Space Apps Challenge???, a 2 day event where people from all over the world could collaboratively develop ideas and open source hardware and software projects that further the goals of exploration and scientific discovery. NASA’s stated goals for the Challenge made it clear that ???open??? was to be a strong theme throughout the event: