Re: The Pursuit of FOSSMAT
Dear Rock,
I must say that I have no real glue about space vehicel simulation at
all. Up to now the packages deal with observational astronomy and
astrophysical simulations. There are some satellite tracking programs in
Debian, but they mainly cover the hamradio field -- we didn't have
someone sufficiently interested in that field yet so that we don't have
a section about satellites and spaceship.
About GMAT: I would also think that the NASA license is not DFSG
compliant; however it may be a matter to discuss in debian-legal; they
often have better arguments here. But: the sourcefore page of GMAT
https://sourceforge.net/projects/gmat/
says that GMAT is Apache-2 licensed, so maybe your information is
outdated here (or the sourceforge page is). Apache-2 is one of the
approved DFSG compatible licenses, so this would not be a problem.
Otherwise it may be worth to discuss the license with the developers;
getting the software into Debian may be an argument to switch to
something free. It would be definitely worth packaging for Debian.
Best regards
Ole
Rock Storm <rockstorm@gmx.com> writes:
> Dear Debian Astro fellows,
>
> I began contributing to Debian not long ago and I couldn't be more
> excited when I found about your existence. I wanted to express my
> concerns about a free and open source space mission analysis tool, so
> you could give your opinion and advice.
>
> For those of you who don't know of what I'm talking about, I would like
> a software capable of simulating a full mission of a space vehicle.
> This means getting not only where the vehicle is at any given time, but
> calculating, for instance, which one is the most efficient trajectory
> to reach a destination given a set of parameters, how much fuel it
> takes, which type of engine should be used, how much sun light will the
> vehicle receive during its fly time, how often and for how long will
> the vehicle be visible from any given ground earth station (or from
> another vehicle),...
>
> I was lucky enough to use STK 7 during my studies, which is a
> commercial software [1] capable of doing pretty much everything
> suggested above, if you can afford the license of course.
>
> The only open source alternative that I know of (please point me in the
> right direction if I'm mistaken here) is GMAT [2] which is developed by
> the NASA and unfortunately licensed under the NASA Open Source License
> Agreement, which is for sure incompatible with the GPL [3] and probably
> also with the DFSG. I've also searched through the Debian Astro
> packages and I didn't find anything like this.
>
> Therefore it seems I'm faced with two options:
> * Packaging GMAT, even though it probably won't make it into main but
> into non-free.
> * Writing a new program from scratch, which, for a non-expert
> programmer like me, feels not only non-viable but also
> like
> reinventing the wheel.
>
> So:
> * Could this idea be interesting for the Debian Astro (or more
> generally, Debian) project?
> * What do you think would be the best way to achieve this?
> * Am I missing any other options? Does Debian Astro have a program
> like these among its packages that I am not aware of?
> * Should I settle for using non-free software?
>
> Thanks a lot,
> Rock Storm
>
> --
>
> [1] http://www.agi.com/products/stk/
> [2] http://gmatcentral.org/
> [3] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#NASA
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