New Catalog Brings NASA Software Down to Earth

Well... on the plus side, there is some good stuff here, and a few "good things" that are Open Source.

But I have to say, I'm largely underwhelmed. Not mind you, by the software itself. But by the fact that the vast majority of this stuff appears under the category of "Government Purpose Release", which, if I'm interpreting this correctly, means you can only use it in service of the US government. And another chunk is "US release only" which pretty much sucks, because it's still not open source, and a restriction like that makes the software fairly useless.

For those of us in the US (and erg, whose tax dollars funded this stuff) it's pretty disappointing to me, to see how much of their software is still locked down and inaccessible. I mean, putting it in a nice pretty catalog is nice and all, but why tease me with something I can't get my hands on, hack on, use, and redistribute?

I also don't understand doing an actual catalog as a PDF, as opposed to a web-based, searchable catalog where you can search by keyword, license, etc.

Oh well, Growler looks kinda cool, and I wouldn't have known about that otherwise. http://people.nas.nasa.gov/~bgreen/growler/