Slashdot Mirror
Government-Funded GPL Software
tgw writes "Tom Adelstein has an article in 'Linux Journal' on how a major milestone in US government-funded OSS recently passed - virtually unnoticed." Slashdot has mentioned this company earlier.
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
But I couldn't figure out what this guy's software actually does. Anyone?
Isn't cfitsio technically GPL released by NASA?
There's also a pragmatic reason to favour GPL. Many OSS developers prefer GPL to BSD, and therefore you are more likely to get fixes if you release under GPL. Besdies which, it's a myth that GPL harms "commercial developers" - indeed they cannot take modifications closed, but they can certainly benefit from the use of the product, and they can even sell it.
If you RTFA, you've realized that:
"Subject matter of copyright: United States Government works: Copyright protection under this title is not available for any work of the United States Government, but the United States Government is not precluded from receiving and holding copyrights transferred to it by assignment, bequest, or otherwise."
For example, Diebold voting software is government funded project but it alone did not make it a public domain, where is in this case, one of the vendor released its government funded software as GPL.
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
The first GPL required US government funded project I know of is the NYU GNAT project which is an Ada GCC front-end, see History in Wikipedia
This was back in 1994 or some such.
Laurent
laurent@guerby.net
Far better to use the GPL. If AOL wants to use the SW they paid for, they can do so. If they want to improve it, they can do that too, but they must distribute their source, so they can't create a huge "incompatibilty-hole" amongst the people who originally paid to produce the software.
This is patently incorrect. If they want to use (in any way, shape or (modified) form) GPL-ed software, they can do so without restriction. However, if they distribute it to someone who is not in-house, and have made modifications, they must also make the source available to them (and for that matter, to anyone else).
I hate it when people assist in the sullying of the GPL name when they attempt to defend it.
The previous sig has been removed due to
Let me get this straight -
You want inefficient and wasteful government solely for the benefit of computer programmers that work at Closed-Source houses?
About 2% of the employed population of the US works in "Computer and Mathamatical Science" jobs. Pare that down to the number that work for the government, get rid of the "Mathamatical Science" jobs, and you should be well less than a percent.
Your inability to cope shouldn't stand in the way of progress.
Also, what is so bad about paying taxes? Like it or not, the services are (mostly) needed. There's something inherently funny about Libertarians and people against the Government. (Originally from the Onion)
I think I need a new sig here.
Diebold software is not paid for by the U.S. government. Voting machines are purchased by state and/or local governments. The federal government doesn't pay for or control them. And the copyright limitations put on the U.S. government by the law cited don't apply to state and local governments.
NSA Secure Linux is GPL. It has to be, since it's a set of patches to Linux. It's now part of the standard kernel, even.
Two very popular "free" packages come from government funded (controlled) origins. Proj (http://proj.maptools.org/, MIT style licence) is perhaps the defacto standard in map projection software. It started life in the USGS. Nedit (http://www.nedit.org/, GPL), one of the very popular text editors, started life in the Fermi Lab (?). Both probably were released under the radar of red tape type administrators and both are now safely housed and supported outside government. It is hard to see their government origins from their present websites.
Does anybody want to start a site highlighting government contributions to open source? It might embarrass them to know how enlightened government can be if sufficiently removed from politically inspired control.
GNU DRM software is already available.
Fellowship 9/11
I don't understand why this sort of thing doesn't happen more often. In fact, I suspect that the GPL license, may be too restrictive and not enforceable. US citizens have a right to receiving that code (and other information) in the public domain under the US Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). (There are limits regarding national security, etc.) This has already been done with software in the past.
The US Department of Veterans Affairs has been actively developing and using the VistA (Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture) software since the 1980's. This software has a proven track record and is used in hundreds of healthcare facilities of all sizes. Many agree that it is at least as good as multi-million dollar systems from companies like Siemens, GE, Cerner, and McKesson.
The VistA software has already been released to the public domain under the US Freedom of Information Act. Since then an active open source community has grown around that freely available code and is even being used in non-government facilities around the world. More recently the open source community and the VA developers have begun discussions on how to combine their efforts.
So if you know of any useful software developed by the US government, speak up and ask for it to be opened up so everyone can benefit!!
I don't think you can safely say that, given the evidence emerging now:
Lt. Gen. Sanchez..borrowed heavily from a list of high-pressure interrogation tactics used at the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and approved letting senior officials at a Baghdad jail use military dogs, temperature extremes, reversed sleep patterns, sensory deprivation, and diets of bread and water on detainees whenever they wished.
I'm currently working on a government owned ROV and am having serious issues with the display and control programs on the system. All of the software was developed by third party companies and own the source code to it. Now if I want to do any reworking of the software it has to be through them and they ain't cheap. So much for the taxpayer's dollar.
I'm a virgo and on Slashdot. Coincidence? Yes.
The article claims that "a Cabinet-level federal agency released a software product under the GPL, making it the first tool of its kind to be licensed by the US government free of charge to public and private sector organizations."
The National Institute of Standards and Technology, part of the Department of Commerce, regularly makes its software available to all comers. The software I know about does not use the GPL, but that doesn't mean it isn't free of charge. In fact, NIST does the GPL one better, because a lot of their free software comes with the phone number of the people who wrote it, and hence free tech support.
I don't know if this is part of the DOC mission, or just the culture that pervades NIST, but I do know that the people there I have dealt with view the public release of their software as a direct consequence of developing it on the public's dime.