Slashdot Mirror
Government Code Collaborative Falls Short
Tom Adelstein writes "This story starts off singing the praises of the Government Open Code Collaborative, then reminds the reader: you discover that it has built one more bureaucracy to oversee its existing bureaucracy, with oversight over the new bureaucracy. Have you ever heard the cliche about prisoners running the asylum? Well, this gated and restrictive open-source government repository fits."
... go to www.gocc.gov instead - they apparantly don't know how to set DNS servers at the government, and require a www. in front... :)
- Leon Mergen
http://www.solatis.com
No slashdotting here... The URL in the article is wrong, it should read http://www.gocc.gov (a Plone site BTW) instead of http://gocc.org.
Not really all that offtopic...
The 'software' I looked at had bits in the blurbs about "To be released Summer 2004" and "Available September 2004". Now, tell me if my clock is wrong, but aren't they like 3 months behind there?
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
this site
has some cool looking stuff available.
http://www.nas.nasa.gov/Research/Software/
But you have to jump through hoops to get it.
In fact, I think that there will always be a problem with "US government" and "open source" at the same time, specifically that the government doesnt want stuff it writes internally (or has written for it by a contractor and owns copyright for) released to people, organizations and countries on that list of "people, organizations and countries we dont like right now" that it has somewhere. (the one places like cuba & iran and people like bin laden are on) because those people, organizations or countries might use this unspecified code to do unspecified "bad things".
Its the same thinking as to why there are still encryption export regulations in the US right now.