Govt Source Code Policy

[Matt Minuti]

On Fri, Mar 25, 2016 at 4:59 PM, Greg Rundlett (freephile) <
greg at freephile.com> wrote:

> Code written by Govt. employees is 'Public Domain', meaning specifically
> exempted from copyright.
>
> However, most? government software is written by contractors, and not
> published or shared.  I don't know for sure, but I imagine that a large
> amount of that work is under a proprietary license.  I think it's a giant
> step in the right direction to get the Govt. to publish, and reuse (our)
> software because we are paying for it once already.  However, I think that
> the primary beneficiaries will be the software ISVs and VARs that will
> essentially have another 'github' of govt. software to grab and bring
> in-house.  The same problem is reflected at GitHub where the majority of
> new projects are selecting non-free licenses now whereas a few years ago
> GPL was the most popular license in the world.
>

It's overwhelmingly proprietary. In fact, when responding to RFQs/RFPs, the
contracting agency asks for a clear description of what the IP rights are,
who gets what kind of ownership and transferability, and so forth. Not just
software, but the products of research, inventions as a result of the work,
methods, applications, you name it.

When I wrote the proposal for BlocksCAD, I made certain that all the work
would be contractually obligated to be open source. Thankfully I was able
to get it released GPL before I left the company. I was going to release
the server side AGPL, but I got some serious pushback on that one, and it
seems like it's still not open at all. Last I was involved, the software
and training materials were going to be added to the DARPA Open Catalog (
http://opencatalog.darpa.mil/) but it looks like that might have fallen by
the wayside, unfortunately.

An interesting thing I learned in the process: at the very least, DARPA
loves open source. They can feel safer using it on secure systems because
it can be verified, and it has a low "sustainment risk," that is, the
company can't suddenly decide to raise the price now that they have a
captive audience, and if the company goes under, the government can keep
using it without worrying about acquiring more licenses or anything.
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