Open Source and Open Science for the Space Industry
Open science and open source software and hardware have strengths and advantages. However, from a cybersecurity perspective, it isn’t easy to anticipate the consequences for space.
An increasing trend in many U.S. and international government agencies seeks to make publicly-funded research accessible to broader levels of society. Open science is the movement worldwide to offer unrestricted access (or as much as possible) to the results, information, software, technical data, publications, etc., to pursue collaborative results. The open science movement seeks to open up the preliminary data and hopefully crowdsource impact.
It’s more common to hear about open source software than open science, where anyone can contribute and edit code.Releasing or open sourcing software used in highly specialized technical or scientific projects is also part of this trend. For example, SpaceX, Microsoft, Amazon, and the Air Force all use open-sourced software such as Python and Linux, among many others, which is then refined or further built into propriety source code. This open source software trend was previously criticized as anathema to intellectual creativity and corporate interests but was adopted by the staunchest critics Microsoft (which later acquired GitHub) and IBM (acquired RedHat).