[extropy-chat] Re: SPACE: where are we?

[Dan Clemmensen]

Rik van Riel wrote:

>On Sat, 7 Feb 2004, Robert J. Bradbury wrote:
>
>  
>
>>One has to wonder what open source development of the Mars Rover
>>software might have been capable of?
>>    
>>
>
>While I am a very big open source proponent myself,
>it will be worth realising that in this case it
>probably wouldn't have helped much, if any.
>
>For one, only NASA seems to have the hardware to
>run these programs on, so there won't be many home
>users reporting bugs and sending in patches...
>
>Open source works best when you have multiple
>participants.
>
>Rik
>  
>
In this case NASA was using variants of commercial hardwrae and software.
Specifically, they were using a PPC variant CPU and VxWorks as the operating
system. The bug occurred when they filled the FLASH disk. This problem 
is not
unique to NASA's hardware. Use of an open-source OS would therefore have
been useful. Among other things, if they had been using an open embedded OS,
they could have published all the code and asked for volunteer 
reviewers. You cannot
easily do this with VxWorks code, because the volunteers would need VxWorks
licenses to run the code in emulation.

There are several viable embedded OSes. Linux is quite suitable when you 
have as much
Flash and RAM as NASA has available (512MB and 256MB respectively) Linux can
run easily on a Palm pilot wiht 8MB, and can be cut down much further if 
needed.