SBTB 2023: Ivan Perez, Open Source in Space.

ai.bythebay.io Nov 2025, Oakland, full-stack AI conference Open Source in Space: Challenges Developing and Adopting Open Source Tools for Aerospace. Assuring software to the level needed to run in safety-critical applications imposes constraints not only on what the software does, but also on how the software is created. The methods required to achieve such level of assurance come with additional rules, making them expensive, complex, and hard to adopt by community-driven open-source projects. This talk discusses our experience developing two open-source projects at NASA: Copilot, a runtime monitoring language that generates realtime C code, and Ogma, a tool to generate runtime monitoring applications ready to run for the Robot Operating System (ROS 2), NASA’s Core Flight System (cFS) and F’(FPrime). Both projects are implemented in Haskell, leverage existing open-source libraries, and are used in flights on unmanned aerial systems. Additionally, both projects follow a strict development process designed to meet NASA’s Software Engineering Requirements (NPR7150). In particular, this talk focuses on the challenges found when adopting a Haskell as a language, the challenges found when getting the community to contribute, and the methods and tools we put in place to make that process easier to adopt by new team members, new projects, and community contributors. Our hope is that our efforts will encourage the community to start a conversation about how we design, develop and maintaining open-source software, and what steps we vcan take to increase its quality and adoption in…