Paypal Adopts Software That NASA Developed and Then Dumped
Paypal To Drop VMware From 80,000 Servers and Replace It With OpenStack, Forbes
“Backed by Intel and Dell, Mirantis has emerged as a clear leader in the OpenStack world heavily promoting and supporting the adoption of the platform originally developed by NASA and Rackspace.”
NASA CIO Dumps NASA-Developed Open Stack, earlier post
“NASA’s prestige and participation has been a selling point for advocates of the OpenStack open source cloud project, which NASA co-founded with San Antonio infrastructure-as-a-service provider RackSpace. Unfortunately, they’ll have to get along without NASA from here on.”
Earlier OpenStack postings
I have zero direct knowledge of any NASA discussions on this, but from the press coverage it looks like PayPal clearly has the internal IT resources and server expertise to handle this and is in the business of running Server/VM software environments , or has the consultant agreements in place to do so. NASA, on the other hand isn’t really in the Server/VM software development business and while it seems to have produced a useful product it isn’t really charged by Congress or the President to become involved with being a software vendor. NASA’s job is rockets, space, science, etc. Kudos to the developers and glad it’s useful, but NASA did what it’s supposed to and bid out the server support functions while releasing the software to live or die on it’s own merits. If a lower bid comes in at the next contract renewal point that uses this software, dandy! Otherwise not much to see here, that I can tell. Nice to see NASA has another spin off to mention in it’s press releases though.
Judging from the comments, the article’s author may have misunderstood a couple things and maybe the OpenStack consultant representative overstated a couple things.
http://www.itpro.co.uk/clou…
It’s funny that NASA keeps on developing technology, dropping it for no clear reason and then later it turns out to be commercially viable and a potential game-changer. It’s sort of becoming a rule of thumb that a technology NASA drops as non-viable is probably going to be good for the industry in question.
At the same time, it could be argued that in this case NASA realized that it was viable, but that they either don’t have the need or don’t have the expertise to take things any further. Being commercially viable is not enough.
If you handed me the best violin in the world I couldn’t make it produce beautiful music; that would require someone who understands the violin and how to play it. I would be wasting my time unless I first spent years learning to play it.
Besides, my understanding has always been that NASA develops “technology,” as you’ve said, to hand off to industry, not products. So, maybe they didn’t “drop” it but rather had taken it a far as their role requires. And that would be your reason.