Review of code.nasa.gov

I was reading an article on Google News, that NASA Powered Down Final IBM Z9 Mainframe, in favor of moving to more server (Linux) based applications. Its a smart move, given the recently announced looming budget cuts. But what caught my eye in that story was a reference to NASA deciding to put all it's Open Source projects under one banner, "code.nasa.gov".

Having participated in one of these projects, World Wind.NET, I was curious to see the state of that project as I've not worked on World Wind for some time now. From what I recall, all projects that were under the NOSA [NASA Open Source Agreement] license, were in fact all listed in one site, back when I contributed to the World Wind project, it escapes my reaches at the moment, but it was a very dated, plain site with many projects I've ever heard of.

In any case, code.NASA.gov is the cool Web 2.0 portal to a variety of projects, it has search and basically that is it. What I found by searching for "World Wind" was a single project page referring only to the World Wind JAVA project: http://code.nasa.gov/project/world-wind-java/. There is not a lot of information there, just a one sentence description, and a link to an externally hosted source code repository on GitHub. I don't see anything about the main developers focused on the WWJ project (from what I recall), I don't see links to WorldWindCentral, the site that hosts the main, active public Forum or the Wiki.

To my disappointment there was also no mention, no link to the source for the WorldWind .NET project which has it's own C# codebase separate from the Java project. I guess you can't expect too much, but to me the fact that they publicize this site as some kind of accomplishment is a little pointless, its a search engine for all NASA Open Source projects, its not a community or anything more. What might be slightly more useful is the related, sites, http://open.nasa.gov/ which has a blog, and I suppose http://data.nasa.gov, which links to other sites containing NASA provided data, which I believe is all in the public domain.

Out of curiosity, I went and revisited the WorldWindCentral forums, not only has NASA stopped supporting or contributing to the WorldWind .NET project, they've apparently turned off all the imagery servers serving the tiles in the format that .NET client application could receive. One of the forum members under his own initiative worked on methods to download the WWJ format data to feed in to the .NET client. This was one of the reasons I gave up participating in that project, it felt like a dead end. Even more shockingly, the developers for WorldWind Java have been asking for donations to keep the WorldWindCentral forums running, this is for a currently active project.