Obama Administration Supports Recycling Code and Open Source

jones_supa writes: The Obama administration is seeking public comments on its open source policy. They have released for public comment a draft Federal Source Code policy to support improved access to custom software code. From the policy document: "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)." Tony Scott, Federal CIO of the US government, mentioned one of the strengths of open source – cost saving. Scott wrote on the White House blog that the U.S. government "can save taxpayer dollars by avoiding duplicative custom software purchases and promote innovation and collaboration across Federal agencies."

Comments

Re:The BSD and MIT licenses are the only real opti

[HornyBastard]

There's no justifiable reason to disallow the distribution of binaries built from modified source code.

My code. My rules. That is all the justification I need.
If you don't like my rules, don't use my code.

Disallowing that isn't promoting freedom; it's eliminating freedom.

The GPL is about the freedom of the code.
with the BSD/MIT/whatever licenses the code is more Free to start with. The GPL makes sure that the code stays Free.
If you don't like the GPL, don't use it.
You just have to understand that different types of people appreciate different types of freedom.