In this edition of our open source news roundup, we take a look at NASA's open source mars rover, Rome's latest open source efforts, two new research projects, and more.
NASA open sources design for a Martian rover
Do you want to build your own Mars rover? Of course you do! And now you can, thanks to NASA's JPL Open Source Rover[1] (OSR for short).
The goal of OSR, which is a smaller version of the Curiosity rover, is "to encourage students, hobbyists, and enthusiasts to work on rover technology." Anyone can grab the plans off GitHub[2] and can "decide what controllers to use, to add USB cameras or solar panels, builders can also attach science payloads." Better still, NASA says that "tech developed by builders of the rovers could be used on future missions on Earth and in space." So get building!
Rome starts going open source
In late 2017, the city of Rome announced that it would start installing LibreOffice on its thousands of workstations. That initiative is finally underway[3].
While the city's IT staff installed LibreOffice on 14,000 workstations in April of this year, they recently began "making LibreOffice the only available suite of office productivity tools on its workstations." The city also has "112 staff members who are in favor of free and open source" who are championing the change and who "encourage their colleagues to find out more by pointing them to a Moodle-based eLearning portal."
New open source research projects
It's no secret that open source software is used across a number of scientific disciplines. Two projects are demonstrating the flexibility and utility of open source in scientific research.
First up, the OpenSim project[4]