Should Software Created By The Federal Gov't Be Open Source Licensed... Or Public Domain?
from the debate-time dept
Anil Dash recently alerted me to a White House petition to get "government-developed software" under an open source license for the sake of allowing others to build on it and approve it.Top Three Reasons to Mandate Open Sourcing of Custom Federal Software:While I certainly share the sentiment expressed in those reasons, I got into a bit of a debate on Twitter about this, because existing law (i.e., 17 USC 105) already says that "Copyright protection under this title is not available for any work of the United States Government." In other words, anything created by the US government is already public domain. Of course, public domain and open source are two different things -- but if something is public domain, it could preclude the ability to then slap a license on it, since those licenses are effectively built off of copyright, and claim specific limitations, which the government might not be able to actually claim over the software. Of course, they don't always seem to follow this, as we noted recently in our post about the NSA open sourcing its database technology, Accumulo.
Openness: Open Sourcing ensures basic fairness and transparency by making software and related artifacts available to the citizens who provided funding, consistent with the President’s 2009 declaration that “Information maintained by the Federal Government is a national asset.”
Economic Multiplier: Making Provides an economic stimulus by serving as the raw material that supports a competitive software development and services industry.
Supports the Federal “Shared First” Agenda: Maximizes value to the government by significantly increasing reuse and collaborative development between federal agencies and the private sector, consistent with the current Office of Management and Budget (OMB) “Shared First” initiative.
The flip side, of course, is that even if something is public domain, the government could still keep it a secret -- as is the case with many Congressional Research Service (CRS) reports. So you can see the argument for pushing for an open source license, rather than just an admission of public domainness. Furthermore, as amac helpfully pointed out, there are significant exceptions to the rules saying the feds can't copyright (for example, contractors or just those funded by the government can copyright their works and then even assign them to the federal government). Furthermore, it may only be seen as public domain in the US, rather than elsewhere.
And, on top of that, Dash made a reasonable point that his focus is on advocating pragmatism in dealing with this -- and he believes that pushing for open source licenses is, perhaps the most pragmatic.
I don't disagree with Dash, but I fear the idea of setting up the belief that the federal government needs to set a particular license for a work to be useful to the public to build on. It only increases the idea that public domain works can be "owned" and limited in ways that is simply not true. I would think that a much more useful solution is a two-fold one: first an admission that government-created software is, in fact, public domain and second, a policy decision and statement that not only will such works be public domain, but, as a matter of standard procedure, that the federal government will also release the code for others to build on with no particular limitations and with encouragement to then share the results in kind.
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Filed Under: copyright, government, open source, public domain, software
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Contractor-developed gov't SW
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Re: Contractor-developed gov't SW
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Re:
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It's the others contributions
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Re: It's the others contributions
I understand that, but the simple fact is that if it's public domain, the government CANNOT put such a restriction on the content, even if it wants to. I recognize it may be good to have that, but I'm not convinced it's legal.
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Re: Re: It's the others contributions
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“it may only be seen as public domain in the US, rather than elsewhere”
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In practice, "public domain" counts as an open source license
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Re:
Note that both the permissive MIT and apache 2.0 are both GPLv3 compatable despite having more restrctions than pubic domain works.
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What you cannot do is take a GPL licenced work and then put it into a MIT licensed work.
It's not just that the GPL requires that derivative works can be incorporated back into the original. It's that the GPL requires every derivative work of a derivative work of a derivative work of a derivative work of a derivative work ad infidium. A derivative work of a MIT licenced work can be closed source. Therefore, if a derivative work of a GPL work is MIT licensed, there is some point in which a derivative of a GPL work can be closed source. This contradicts the GPL license. Therefore a derivative work of a GPL work cannot be MIT licened.
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Oversight
The answer is adequate oversight from the political level. Senior bureaucrats need to be held accountable (that is, fired) when this little scenario plays out. Alas, Congress declines to adequately perform its oversight responsibilities. It is too much like hard work for them. The only answer to that is to make it an election issue. US voters, do your duty.
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Most US gov't software doesn't fall under public domain clause...
This isn't as stupid as it sounds since it makes the developer fully responsible for the software (in the same way off-the-shelf software is) and it allows for intra-agency re-use. Intra-agency re-use is really, really hard otherwise as Congress bans cross-agency resource usage in any way. Basically, sharing resources between agencies requires explicit Congressional approval (aka, a law). Never mind laws that prevent the US gov't from doing anything competitive with the private sector...
Open source *might* be a solution, but the management of an open source project is even more a headache (see above re: resources), so that's not optimal...
The only other 'easy' solution is to contractually require the developer to license their work under an OS license. Of couse, the developer would still retain copyright, so it would make zero difference in practice and if you wanted a community it would wind up costing more money...
How do I know this? I advised four cabinet level US gov't agencies on open source strategies. Usage is easy, but creating/managing it is very, very hard. Politically, it's far easier to just keep it proprietary. Besides, the gov't often extracts other benefits by using Cooperative Research & Development Agreements (CREDA) to get free stuff in exchange for it's IP....
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Public Domain for government software
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