<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:georgia,serif">The years I spent writing software for defense contractors tells me that the SW is marked 'copyright <company name here>' all over it. Paid for with tax dollars or not, the company that wrote it does it's best to keep the copyright for it.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:georgia,serif"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:georgia,serif">IMO this is going to run into the same issue that GPL has, someone is going to take this and make money off of it and the people giving it out are going to get angry and change their mind. I believe that is why GPL is being replaced by non-free licenses. The developers are seeing the work they did for free make money for someone else, once the government sees that they'll go the same route.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:georgia,serif"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:georgia,serif">Rich</div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br clear="all"><div><div class="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div style="font-size:small"><font face="georgia, serif"><br></font></div><div style="font-size:small"><font face="georgia, serif">Richard Kolb II</font></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>
<br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sun, Mar 27, 2016 at 12:54 PM, Matt Minuti <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:matt.minuti@gmail.com" target="_blank">matt.minuti@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_extra"><span class=""><div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Mar 25, 2016 at 4:59 PM, Greg Rundlett (freephile) <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:greg@freephile.com" target="_blank">greg@freephile.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div>Code written by Govt. employees is 'Public Domain', meaning specifically exempted from copyright. <div><br></div><div>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.</div></div></blockquote></div><br></span><div><div>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.<br><br></div>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 (<a href="http://opencatalog.darpa.mil/" target="_blank">http://opencatalog.darpa.mil/</a>) but it looks like that might have fallen by the wayside, unfortunately.<br><br></div>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.<br></div></div>
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