Cool news from NASA

They are open-sourcing their software. From opensource.com:

NASA launches code.nasa.gov to share and collaborate further with the open source community
Following the release of its Open Government Plan and the Open Source Summit last year, NASA has now launched code.nasa.gov to "continue, unify, and expand NASA�s open source activities."

The site is still in "early alpha," but you can browse NASA's open source projects, learn more about how the agency contributes to open source, and start making contributions yourself. A long list of projects is posted, but only four have links available now, and they're all on Github:

�OpenMDAO, a Multidisciplinary Design Analysis and Optimization framework written in Python
�World Wind, a 3D interactive world viewer created by NASA's Learning Technologies project
�Vision Workbench, an image processing and computer vision library
�Research Center StereoPipeline, automated tools for processing images captured from robotic explorers on other planets

As Rikki Endsley points out in NetworkWorld, there's also a lot more to explore at open.nasa.gov while you're waiting for what's to come at code.nasa.gov. This is the site for wider community participation--even if you're not a developer, you can still get involved. NASA has been working hard to be more broadly open to citizen participation, based on it 1958 charter, which guides the agency to ��provide for the widest practicable and appropriate dissemination of information.�

Very cool -- being able to automate image processing is a very nice tool to have. Photoshop has some abilities to do this but only very shallow.