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The US Department Of Defense Announces An Open Source Code Repository (defense.gov)
"The Pentagon is the latest government entity to join the open-source movement," writes NextGov. An anonymous reader quotes their report:
The Defense Department this week launched Code.mil, a public site that will eventually showcase unclassified code written by federal employees. Citizens will be able to use that code for personal and public projects... The Defense Department's Digital Service team, whose members are recruited for short-term stints from companies including Google and Netflix, will be the first to host its code on the site once the agreement is finalized... "This is a direct avenue for the department to tap into a worldwide community of developers to collectively speed up and strengthen the software development process," a DOD post announcing the initiative said. The Pentagon also aims to find software developers and "make connections in support of DOD programs that ultimately service our national security."
Interestingly, there's no copyright protections on code written by federal employees, according to U.S. (and some international) laws, according to the site. "This can make it hard to attach an open source license to our code, and our team here at Defense Digital Service wants to find a solution. You can submit a public comment by opening a GitHub issue on this repository before we finalize the agreement at the end of March."
Interestingly, there's no copyright protections on code written by federal employees, according to U.S. (and some international) laws, according to the site. "This can make it hard to attach an open source license to our code, and our team here at Defense Digital Service wants to find a solution. You can submit a public comment by opening a GitHub issue on this repository before we finalize the agreement at the end of March."
Stallman may argue that you need to make sure the code is free in the future, but I'd settle for the code being free now.
I'm willing to accept that it probably can't be copyrighted.
That doesn't mean you can't put a license on it. And there are plenty of licenses to choose from. One must be pretty close to suitable.
There's neither a need for a license, nor would a license have any meaning in this context. The whole purpose of a license is to disclaim or enumerate the rights being retained by the copyright holder. If the works belongs to the public domain, a license has no meaning and any attempt to attach a license would be an attempt to (fraudulently) assert rights that only belong to the owner of the material, of which there is none.
Setting those concerns aside, there are a few licenses that approximate to varying degrees the rights provided by public domain works (e.g. MIT or BSD), but attaching them to these documents to describe the rights of users would be like saying that the UN charter is the official document Americans should use to understand their right to free speech, rather than the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights. The laws regarding works in the public domain would still be the governing rules here, rather than whatever license they attached, so it makes no sense to attach a license in the first place.