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Massachusetts Builds Open-Source Public Repository
An anonymous reader writes "Massachusetts on Wednesday took the wraps off a new software repository designed to let government agencies make more efficient use of open-source software. The repository will be managed by the Government Open Code Collaborative, a newly formed group of seven states and four municipalities that will contribute and download open-source software and proprietary software designed by government agencies for their use."
The ITD website has some really kewl stuff on it like a legal toolkit for using Open Source software. Press releases on the sit seem to indicate that Republican Governer Mitt Romney is behind the move to open source. He'll be getting my vote when he runs for re-election.
If you contact one of the members of the GOCC, they can likely get any government entity into the project that is willing to work with open source. It's actually a really cool initiative and will hopefully drive consistent open source applications in government.
gd.tuwien.ac.at
Granted much of the software isn't as user-oriented, but that's not the point. The point is it is another government institution that has put real effort into making free software available to the public.
;)
http://fermitools.fnal.gov/
This is just one example I personally know of. Is this common at all? I'm too lazy to sift through every *.gov domain hunting for a software page.
In fact, the Government of Finland, via the University of Helsinki, funded the beginnings of Linux by keeping Linus employed and not bothering him. Of course, nowadays the university is, shall we say, much more proactive about IPR issues, so it won't probably happen again.
IANAL
Elsewhere in the article it explains that whenever states wanted to reuse each others software they needed to meet with lawyers and come up with a contract. This "collaborative" is like an ongoing contract/project. Instead of meeting after meeting you sign one contract and all future software in the collaborative comes under those terms.
That being understood, the collaborative is not public. It is a private agreement among state governments. The software used by the collaborative is not public. You must sign a contract to see and use the software. The collaborative is not distributing the software. It is like a coporation that uses GPL software and modifies it for internal use. They are not distributing it to the public and they are not selling it so they do not have to make their changes public or provide source. They are complying with the GPL.
I think it would be better for them and for the Open Source community if they just worked via Source Forge or Savannah, thereby getting the benefits of more developers and at the same time contributing back software to the community. It seems for legal reasons that they cannot.
Possibly there can be a compromise. Right now there is a one way valve. The collaborative can take in Open Source code and make changes, but does not give back. Maybe they can not be completely open with their code continuously but they can, on a regular basis, provide patches back to the projects they use as part of their projects. If done often enough it would be little different from have a completely open project.
The only problem would be if someone in government invents a completely new project from scratch. In that case, maybe they could convince a contractor to create a external Open Source version under the GPL and donate the code to that to be run as a seperate project in paralell to the original. (Think Apache vs NCSA)
The license being used by the repository is explicitly not GPL-compatible. It prohibits any commercial use of the code. This is a primary reason for setting up the repository, as commonwealth-produced software cannot (under the current system) be used by entities to make money, according to the article.
May we never see th