What Can You Actually Do with Newly-Released NASA Code?

This Thursday, NASA will unveil a catalog of different software that their employees have designed over the years. The code from a total of 1,000 software projects will become available for free and will be copy-right free, too. Judging from some of the stories about this exciting news, one might get the impression that any person in the general public can take this newly-released material and design their very own rocket project. This would be a fallacy. The code will likely become an invaluabl...