"We the people" source released

[Posted August 23, 2012 by corbet]

The White House (the office of the US president) has made its "We the people" platform, the Drupal-based system that handles its petitions site, available on Github under the GPLv2+ license. "Releasing the source code for this application is meant to empower other governments and organizations to use this platform to engage their own citizens and constituencies. In addition, public review and contribution to the application’s code base will help strengthen and improve the platform."

"We the people" source released

Posted Aug 24, 2012 2:53 UTC (Fri) by jhoblitt (subscriber, #77733) [Link] (4 responses)

Since when can uncle sam hold a copyright? (With a copyright needed to apply a copyright license)

"We the people" source released

Posted Aug 24, 2012 2:57 UTC (Fri) by imgx64 (guest, #78590) [Link]

From the Github page:

This project constitutes a work of the United States Government and is not subject to domestic copyright protection under 17 USC § 105.

The project utilizes code licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License and therefore is licensed under GPL v2 or later.

"We the people" source released

Posted Aug 24, 2012 3:36 UTC (Fri) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]

"Copyright protection under this title is not available for any work of the United States Government, but the United States Government is not precluded from receiving and holding copyrights transferred to it by assignment, bequest, or otherwise. - 17 USC S105

Further, something doesn't need to be copyrightable under domestic law to be considered copyrightable under Berne. The US government claims the right to assert copyright over its works outside the US.

"We the people" source released

Posted Aug 24, 2012 3:36 UTC (Fri) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]

It really depends on what one means by "Hold a Copyright". The have been ways that works have been "copyright" of the United States since at least the Reagan administration and probably a lot longer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_work_by_...

Most of the stuff I have seen was stuff done by contractors and then transferred to the US Government.

"We the people" source released

Posted Aug 24, 2012 14:22 UTC (Fri) by david.a.wheeler (subscriber, #72896) [Link]

Uncle Sam holds lots of copyrights. When US (federal) government employees create works as part of their official duties, their work is not subject to copyright in the US. But most software for Uncle Sam is written by contractors, who aren't subject to that law.

For details, see my paper: Publicly Releasing Open Source Software Developed for the U.S. Government, Journal of Software Technology, February 2011, Vol. 14, Number 1.

"We the people" source released

Posted Aug 24, 2012 8:13 UTC (Fri) by job (guest, #670) [Link] (4 responses)

Lots of code forking here. These big PHP frameworks have a code reusability problem.

"We the people" source released

Posted Aug 24, 2012 9:35 UTC (Fri) by reddit (guest, #86331) [Link]

Considering they are written in one of the worst languages ever conceived, that's not surprising at all.

"We the people" source released

Posted Aug 24, 2012 9:43 UTC (Fri) by os3294 (guest, #86384) [Link] (1 responses)

That's hardly unique to web frameworks, look at all the forks in major Open Source projects lately. Hardly a day goes by without a part of the desktop stack being forked because people can't play nicely together.

"We the people" source released

Posted Aug 24, 2012 9:55 UTC (Fri) by rwst (guest, #84121) [Link]

People no longer fork only because chemistry between developers is bad, they fork more now because it's much easier with git to fork (and merge again). There is however something in the observation that PHP forks are culminating. I'm personally not touching that language with a long stick.

"We the people" source released

Posted Aug 24, 2012 11:26 UTC (Fri) by Klavs (guest, #10563) [Link]

How do you know the code has been forked?

Have you checked that core Drupal and all the modules which have an upstream (different than the one who created the site) isn't just the same - but added to github to make it "simple" (ie. just duplicated code - nothing else) ?

Normally, Drupal developers are good at following the standard way of developing Drupal sites, which means NO core changes, and all changes done using hooks - in a module they write themselves, and in the theme itself.

So I don't think there's a lot of forking going on here - I actually highly doubt it.

I'm sure that's probably not the same for many other projects, but Drupal is actually a very well managed project with very sane development practicses IMHO. I particularly enjoy the fact, that new releases of same major version (f.ex. 6.0,6.1 etc.) just as RHEL does it, only contains severe bugfixes, and security updates - meaning you can actually upgrade rather safely, without getting featurechanges etc. They don't support each release for as many years, as RHEL does though - "only" until two new major releases has come out.

So Drupal is IMHO a very company friendly project, in that you get security upgrades ONLY - support for this for a long time - and security announcements as well.

PHP is in many ways not a well-designed language - but that does not mean Drupal isn't a great project or CMS Framework.