Interviewers: Scott Swigart, and Sean Campbell
Interviewee: Patrick Hogan

Patrick Hogan

In this interview, we spoke with Patrick Hogan about open source at NASA. Patrick has been managing NASA open source projects since 2002, incubating competitive technologies to deliver scientific content. The goal has been to engineer open source solutions that leverage open data standards for sustainable technologies that can be extended in both open and proprietary ways. Several successful projects have come out of this program, including a virtual scanning electron microscope, software that allows the blind to aurally visualize mathematical equations, and the very successful NASA World Wind, a fully navigable 3D geospatial data visualization platform.

In this interview, Patrick talks about:

• The NASA World Wind open-source project
• Preventing a strong fork
• Spec’ing features on an open-source project   
• World Wind extensibility, even for non-programmers
• Not everything the government writes is open-source and/or public domain
• You add value on open source, not in open source

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