NASA and open-source software

Posted Feb 16, 2023 21:14 UTC (Thu) by dullfire (guest, #111432)
In reply to: NASA and open-source software by Kluge
Parent article: NASA and open-source software

> Say a NASA programmer wants to modify an existing Linux kernel driver to make it work for a new Mars rover. The new driver is a derived work of the old driver, which was under the GPL. So the new driver is similarly de facto GPL code.

This misunderstands what copyrights NASA would be eligible for if it was a private organization. A private organization would only have copyright on the patch they wrote. There is unlikely to be any issues with releasing the patch itself as public domain. Of course when applied to the GPL'd driver, the result is GPLd, but NASA isn't authoring the new driver, just the public domain patch.

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NASA and open-source software

Posted Feb 16, 2023 21:22 UTC (Thu) by Kluge (subscriber, #2881) [Link] (1 responses)

A patch is often (though not always) a derived work of the parent code, is it not? Therefore a derived-work patch to copylefted code (not sure about BSD) would also have to be released under the same license.

NASA and open-source software

Posted Feb 17, 2023 2:22 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> would also have to be released under the same license.

Wrong. So long as the two licences are compatible, WHAT licence it is is irrelevant.

What matters is that the two different *copyrights* can be distributed together. If the licences are compatible then that's fine.

Okay, it's *discourteous* to use a different licence, but it's not a problem.

Cheers,
Wol