Thursday, December 15, 2011

Open Source

I am currently open-sourcing or thinking about open-sourcing three pieces of software
  1. The simulation platform I used for most of my research in grad school. You can run it and see the results at http://alumni.soe.ucsc.edu/~mds/cclsim/.

    Currently I am in the process of talking to the appropriate people at the University of California about how to do this, as I wrote most of this in the process of research for the UC. Hopefully it'll turn out that language in one of the federal grants I received forces me to open it, or that at least it'll turn out to have so little commercial application that opening it is not a problem.

  2. The library and platforms used to generate most of the projects at http://alumni.soe.ucsc.edu/~mds/?News=collapse&Other=expand&Demos=expand#Demos.

    While these were developed when I was a graduate student, most of it was done before I had any research grants, and all of it was done on my own equipment.

    My main hesitation about opening it up is that I'll have to publicly admit to having used "glVertex3f" as late as 2004/2005.

    For what it's worth, a snapshot of the code is at http://www.club.cc.cmu.edu/~mds2/old_ucsc_gl_source/

  3. The source for http://alumni.soe.ucsc.edu/~mds/spacecraft_sim/.

    While this project was built on top of the libraries described in the second item, this particular integration *was* done as part of official university research. I'm hoping that the fact that I did it on a NASA grant means I am forced to open it, but because it was done as a University researcher, I am pretty sure I have to go through a different path to open it up.