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US Govt Commits To Publish Publicly Financed Software Under FOSS (k7r.eu)
An anonymous reader writes: The White House has published a draft (PDF) for a Source Code Policy. The policy requires every public agency to publish their custom-build software as Free Software for other public agencies as well as the general public to use, study, share and improve the software. The Source Code Policy is intended for efficient use of US taxpayers' money and reuse of existing custom-made software across the public sector. It is said to reduce vendor lock-in of the public sector, and decrease duplicate costs for the same code which in return will increase transparency of public agencies. The custom-build software will also be published to the general public either as public domain, or as Free Software so others can improve and reuse the software. Looking at the exceptions, it appears the list excludes a number of interesting things. But what's remarkable here is that, by default, publicly financed software will now be deemed as open-source. That's a win.
Conceivably, if the software fit their needs closely enough. However, isn't that a small price to pay for the taxpayers who paid for the software being able to use it; as well as any benefits derived from cooperative governments and organizations that decide that mainstreaming is more efficient than forking(I'm assuming that the license will be something MIT-like, not that commie GPL, so cooperation will be optional; but maintaining your own fork isn't something that people who dislike thankless busy work do without good reason.)
Perhaps more broadly, isn't there something dangerously petty, unambitious, and ultimately self-defeating in approaching problems in the spirit of "Gotta keep the other guy from getting what's mine!" rather than "We are looking to produce nothing less than the best, if that happens to be of benefit to others, so be it."
This doesn't mean that we need to send Kim Jong Un a 'Nukes for Noobs' tutorial just to be nice; but a person, organization, or nation rarely achieves excellence or greatness if they focus more on making sure that the other guy isn't somehow free-riding than on making sure that their work is something that is worth emulating.
You are referring to code produced by a government employee. This applies to products that the federal government pays a contractor to develop, the government is now supposed to include language in the contract stating the government owns the produced code and the code will be released into the public domain. You would be shocked about how much code the US Government has paid for but which the contractor claims to still own. Lots of code that runs our weapons systems is supposedly owned by the company that was paid to produce the code.