NASA and open-source software

I think the gist of it is that the NASA lawyers who drafted the original NASA Open Source Agreement must have been captivated by the copyleft paradigm (as admittedly many lawyer enthusiasts were in those early days of open source) and wanted ambitiously to create a license with copyleft or copyleft-like provisions comparable to the GPL that would somehow be consistent with the statutory preclusion of copyright in works of NASA civil servants.

The submitted versions of the revised NOSA (which occurred mostly during the time I was on the OSI board) however had a number of problems which may have come down simply to poor drafting, but I had a concern that the NASA lawyers (who seemed to be primarily patent lawyers by training) were trying to draft the license in such a way that patent licensing obligations would not apply equally to NASA and to NOSA licensees. (NASA has a revenue-generating patent portfolio program.)