I wasn't familiar with that CPU so I just returned from an RCA 1802 rabbit hole.[1]

Fascinating CPU with some neat 1970s applications (like spacecraft and the ELFs). Oh, and a member of the Radiation-Hardened Microprocessors club.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RCA_1802

Seeing 1802 and Lisp together is not something that happens very often.

This code was written while I was an employee of JPL in 1993. I don't know what its copyright status is.

IANAL but I believe it would be public domain due to being a work of the US government..

https://www.quora.com/Is-content-produced-by-U-S-government-...

JPL is run by California Institute of Technology and the work they do is under contract to NASA, so I would be cautious about calling things that stem from there a public domain government work.

JPL (or, rather, Caltech) maintains a blanket policy that the copyright to all JPL-owned software remains with Caltech, although they do permit software (on a case-by-case basis, as approved by the tech transfer office) to be open-sourced: https://ott.jpl.nasa.gov/software

In this case, the linked software definitely isn't public domain and it's most likely not open source (since this wasn't an approved release through JPL/Caltech). Also, given that the linked software's running on a spacecraft, distributing it might be in violation of federal law (thanks to ITAR/EAR-- spacecraft and related articles are on the US Munitions List).

Correct me if I’m wrong, but does that mean Caltech gets to prevent the public release of software taxpayers have funded through NASA (unless excepted by the tech transfer dept)?

Once upon a time, before the internet and open source were a thing, leaving copyright and patents with the university was believed to be the best way to make innovation broadly available. The theory was it gave the university an incentive to publicize and license tech. Otherwise the fear was that government funded research would never be transferred to industry. This may no longer be the old or best solution but it is the system in place.

If that's how the contract's written, yes.

IME (and I've worked on a number of federally funded projects at this point, both in and out of academia), these contracts typically get written such that the institution retains all rights to the software, but grants the US government unlimited rights to use the software.

(I will note that it's also not unheard of for these contracts to stipulate that the end product becomes open source-- software I've worked on that was funded through DARPA is up on GitHub, for example.)