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Comment by chrisatumd | Hacker News Reader

I had no idea this was out there. I found a bunch of old projects out here from a program I work on in the realm of Earth Science. Things from 2002 and 2004 that have probably not been used in over 10 years (and some from the same time frame that are still in production).

It has been really hard for us to open source things lately - our last project took more than a year. I did find it on this page: https://github.com/nasa/earthdata-search. We are still working on open sourcing a couple more of our projects.

We've been told one of NASA's recent goals is to significantly improve the open source process so hopefully we'll see more of the current projects become open source.

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Why is it hard to open source things?

Liability. Same thing with why it can be hard to use open source in a large company. Liability.

If something screws up they dont want to be sued. If you use open source you can't sue someone if it breaks...but if I use Oracle I can get support and in extreme case sue for damages.

> but if I use Oracle I can get support and in extreme case sue for damages.

That's not true. Most proprietary software licenses have the "not suitable for purpose" warranty clause that basically means that you can't sue them if their database crashes on you. Oh, and you can get support for free software from many different companies (SUSE and RedHat being two).

That sounds like the opposite problem from releasing open source code. I would imagine one of NASA's concerns is ensuring none of the code reveals classified information. Another risk (this one for anyone thinking about publishing their code) is that it turns out to infringe on some obscure patent - though I'm not sure if it would be easier or harder to get a settlement from NASA than a private business. (So yes, "Liability." is still a possible reason.)

But don't most open source licenses waive liability? MIT and other popular licenses state that the work is provided "as is" and that the author cannot be held liable.

> But don't most open source licenses waive liability?

Most open source licenses include a liability disclaimer. Many jurisdictions, OTOH, have laws which limit the effect of liability disclaimers, so whether the disclaimer means anything, and if so what it means, varies based on which jurisdictions law applies to the liability at issue.

The company I work for is scared to use open source often, much less let people release it. They care more about scoring patents on useless processes than on releasing useful code that could have been written by a competent intern at LITERALLY any company in the industry.

Decisions made by lawyers and bureaucrats.

(These opinions are mine and not necessarily those of my employer)

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