White House Further Embraces Open Source For Government... But Tell It To Do Even More

from the good-to-see dept

With so much annoying stuff coming out of the White House lately, it's good to see the tech folks there continue to do some good work, including pushing for a policy that should lead to further embracing open source technologies inside the federal government -- in part by pushing the government itself to open source the code it writes for its own work (and even when not releasing the code to the public, at least sharing it inside the government for other agencies to use).

This policy requires that, among other things: (1) new custom code whose development is paid for by the Federal Government be made available for reuse across Federal agencies; and (2) a portion of that new custom code be released to the public as Open Source Software (OSS).

This new policy has been put out for comment, and there's a chance for you to tell the White House to go even farther with this policy. The current request asks if the policy could be improved in the following manner:

Would an “open source by default” approach that required all new Federal custom code to be released as OSS, subject to exceptions for things like national security, be more or less effective in achieving the goals above?

I think the answer to this question needs to be that, yes, such a policy would be greatly improved by pushing for open source by default. With the current policy stating that just "a portion" of the code is released that way, it almost guarantees that very little will be. Moving to a policy where it's open source by default would lead to a design mentality that keeps that in mind.

Of course, some may (quite reasonably!) argue that copyright does not apply to any works created by the federal government itself (though it does apply to anything written by contractors, who can then assign that copyright to the government). Thus, if the software in question was created by federal employees, then it should, automatically be in the public domain, in which case the government has no legal right to place any legal restrictions on its use, even open source restrictions. Though, of course, in that case, it still has to make the decision over whether or not to release the code publicly. Unfortunately, the current policy says that it would apply to software written by federal employees as well -- and that might actually not be allowed under the law. That software is in the public domain.

Of course, it's likely that plenty of code used in government is actually written by contractors, and for that code, the default should absolutely be that it be open sourced whenever possible.

For what it's worth, rather than the annoying standard commenting process for most government comments, this one is being done on Github, so join in.

Filed Under: code sharing, copyright, federal government, open source, public domain