Why The US Government Open Sources Its Code (opensource.com)

He's been the White House technology advisor since 2015, and this month Alvand Salehi delivered a keynote address at OSCON about the U.S. government's commitment to open source software. An anonymous reader quotes OpenSource.com: The Federal Source Code Policy, released in August 2016, was the first U.S. government policy to support open source across the government... All new custom source code developed by or for the federal government must be available to all other federal agencies for sharing and reuse; and at least 20% of new government custom-developed code must be released to the public as open source. It also established Code.gov as a platform for access to government-developed open source code and a way for other developers to participate.

Before this policy was released, agencies were spending a lot of money to redevelop software already in use by other government agencies. This initiative is expected to save the government millions of dollars in wasteful and duplicative spending on software development. Because of this, Salehi said, open source is not a partisan issue, and "Code.gov is here to stay." Another benefit: Releasing open source code allows the government to benefit from the brainpower of developers across the country to improve their code.
Code.gov points potential contributors to their code repository on GitHub.

Comments

For how much longer though?

[bjwest]

I expect Trump to nix this as yet another of Obama's "bad policys".

Mostly Javascript for US Government Web Apps

[mykepredko]

It's a great initiative but...

Somehow I can't see LLNL releasing codes for simulating nuclear processes. Similarly, I don't see the CIA, NSA, FBI releasing code for their intelligence, data gathering/mining and investigations. Just thinking about it, I suspect that a lot of this code isn't written by the US Government, but by contractors who can patent/copyright and make it ineligible for this program.

That leaves... Javascript used for different website apps. I would be surprised if anything much of anything else was published through this program.

Re:Mostly Javascript for US Government Web Apps

[ShanghaiBill]

That leaves... Javascript used for different website apps. I would be surprised if anything much of anything else was published through this program.

Instead of spouting off your ignorant (and incorrect) opinion about what is on code.gov, why didn't you just take 30 seconds to go there and have look before posting?

Re:Mostly Javascript for US Government Web Apps

[TheLongshot]

Just to correct some errors in your assumptions: First, while contractors write the bulk of code for the US government, it is all work for hire and owned by the government. Second, even much of the software written for the IC is not classified. Most of the time, it is the data that it processes that is classified.

As someone who has worked as a government contractor for years, duplication of effort between agencies is a big problem, one which the government has worked hard at trying to resolve. This is a good step in the right direction.

Re:Back to Ada?

[Anonymous Coward]

So wait, you designed it in C, but then blame ADA for the bugs... uhm, why? Of course ADA might be half the speed, it requires a lot more specifications and safety checks. Which require proper planning. Something designed properly in C can be done in ADA, but proper design in ADA would be very difficult to do in C. You did not use ADA, you poorly translated a C design and then blamed ADA for it.

Re:Back to Ada?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually you answered your own problems. C does not have extensive type checking and logic error checking as ADA does. It's obvious your teams were not well versed in using ADA, otherwise you would have done proper design and found the "logic and spec" errors. I would wager that if you finished the complete design in C those bugs would also exist.