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Next steps – Outcomes from USAF museum walk, 15 Jan 2010

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After much discussion

  • We need accurate descriptions of each aspect of our mission:
    • Low hanging fruit = “open design” and “mature technology” shoud be easy
    • What do we mean by “spacefaring society”?
    • “Sustainable Leadership” needs some additional discussion and definition
  • In order to keep momentum of making progress and in the spirit of “just enough” we need to conduct a small fundraising campaign aimed at friends and family.  We’re not quite ready to “go viral” or open an integrated online fundraising campaign just yet.
  • Again to keep the momentum going, we must start implementing the actions identified last year during out strategic planning.

Progress Report on Open Design/Open Source Hardware Licensing

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One of the pivotal components of Open Design is a set of licenses foropen source hardware (be sure to click through to the PDF) that mirror the ideals underlying the various open source software licenses (and the Creative Commons which has distilled the idea into four traits that combine to form six licenses).  Finding or developing such licenses has been, and continues to be, a major road block for Mach 30.  The good news is that the open source community is thinking about this, too, and there are some licenses to consider.

One promising license is the TAPR Open Hardware License (TAPR OHL), written by John Ackerman (scroll down to read about his NTP servers), a resident of the Dayton area.  He has written an article in the UD Law Review discussing the TAPR OHL from a legal perspective.  In terms of the Creative Commons licensing terms, the TAPR OHL would probably best be described as an “Attribution Share Alike” license, or in software terms a GPL-like license.  There is also a non-commercial “flavor” of the license, that probably maps to the Creative Commons “Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike”.  I am personally very excited by the inclusion of multiple “flavors” of the license, as I think it is important that the Open Design community have the same choices artists and software developers do in the Creative Commons and various open source software licenses.

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When considering automation

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This interesting article in the IEEE Spectrum Magazine.  As the amount of automation increases does the world become a better place?  This article relates a few of the mishaps that were caused by the over-reliance on software.  Statistically speaking, however, these stories are the extreme outliers when considering the millions of passengers that travel on planes, trains, and ships annually.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/automated-to-death/0

What level of complexity is required to mandate the use of software logic and automation?  These questions are some of the issues that will need to be discussed in the future.  This is especially the case when considering human “safety of flight” concerns.