I you think the NASA Open Source License is bad, look at the default license for non-commercial, ESA-funded software [1].

The territorial limitations effectively prevents any form of open distribution, yet the license is open enough to remove most commercial incentive for maintenance and further development: a perfect recipe to make software instant abandonware upon release.

[1] https://essr.esa.int/license/european-space-agency-community...

For what it's worth, we developers (I'm a NASA contractor who maintains a small NASA open source project) feel the same way! Our lawyers not so much. It's a very slow process to change the default, but at least a couple of projects have managed to release under Apache instead of NOSA.

I mentioned FPrime in a previous comment... Looks like that's released under the Apache license: https://github.com/nasa/fprime/blob/master/LICENSE.txt

Isn't the problem that government work is public domain so they can't legally release it copy-left?