NASA recently made 1100 Apollo-era documents, including Mission Reports (I have read several, and they are truly fascinating to those interested in manned spaceflight), Evaluation Reports, Scientific Studies, and Interviews, available on a DVD-ROM, calling it the Lunar e-Library. Fantastic! All are government documents, and putting them all together like this is a boon for researchers, enthusiasts, historians, librarians, and such.
However, they contracted for software that limits distribution of the software itself to employees of NASA. That’s it. Game over. Nobody else can use this wonderful DVD. There are several good options in the open source software world for this project, and the only restriction would be that the software license would need to remain open. No big deal.
Why keep all this wonderful information closed off? This would have been one of the great DVD-ROM offerings, except it cannot be offered to the public because of a restrictive software license, and for no good reason. Arrrghh!
from Catalogablog
