In a statement on the open.NASA blog, the space agency announced on Wednesday the launch of a new code.nasa.gov website that will become a portal for NASA's open source software development activities. In its current form, it hosts a directory of the organization's open source software projects and provides documentation about NASA's open source software processes. As the site matures, NASA intends to turn it into a development hub with a forum and hosted collaboration tools that make it easier for NASA software projects to transition to open development.

NASA has a long history of productive collaboration with the open source software community on projects ranging from beautifying bug trackers to building more scalable open source solutions for self-hosted cloud computing. The latter is, of course, a reference to OpenStack, an increasingly significant open source software project that NASA pioneered with Rackspace.

The open source software projects that are listed in the new code.nasa.gov directory at launch include a lunar mapper and an orbit determination toolbox. Some of the projects on the list already have source code published in NASA's GitHub repository, but others are labeled to indicate that code is coming soon.