The People’s Code (White House blog)

[Posted August 9, 2016 by ris]

US Chief Information Officer Tony Scott introduces the Federal Source Code Policy, on the White House blog. "By making source code available for sharing and re-use across Federal agencies, we can avoid duplicative custom software purchases and promote innovation and collaboration across Federal agencies. By opening more of our code to the brightest minds inside and outside of government, we can enable them to work together to ensure that the code is reliable and effective in furthering our national objectives. And we can do all of this while remaining consistent with the Federal Government’s long-standing policy of technology neutrality, through which we seek to ensure that Federal investments in IT are merit-based, improve the performance of our government, and create value for the American people." (Thanks to David A. Wheeler)

The People’s Code (White House blog)

Posted Aug 10, 2016 10:19 UTC (Wed) by xtifr (guest, #143) [Link] (2 responses)

> "This policy also establishes a pilot program that requires agencies, when commissioning new custom software, to release at least 20 percent of new custom-developed code as Open Source Software (OSS) for three years [...]"

This is a bit confusing. It sounds like they're saying that the code only has to remain open for three years, after which time, it could be...withdrawn? That sounds messy! I hope what they're really saying is that code developed during the next three years has to be 20% OSS. But the phrasing here is sure ambiguous!

(I also think, and I'm sure many here would agree, that code developed on the public's dime should be 100% open, insofar as it may be possible, but this is a promising first step.)

The People’s Code (White House blog)

Posted Aug 10, 2016 14:58 UTC (Wed) by kiko (subscriber, #69905) [Link]

My understanding is that this is a 3-year pilot program, so this guideline would apply within that period. It's unclear what happens after the 3 years, but I assume a review would be done in order to inform future OSS policy.

The People’s Code (White House blog)

Posted Aug 11, 2016 19:18 UTC (Thu) by david.a.wheeler (subscriber, #72896) [Link]

>> "This policy also establishes a pilot program that requires agencies, when commissioning new custom software, to release at least 20 percent of new custom-developed code as Open Source Software (OSS) for three years [...]"

>This is a bit confusing. It sounds like they're saying that the code only has to remain open for three years, after which time, it could be...withdrawn?

No, no. For each year of the next 3 years, at least 20% of the custom code must be OSS.

> (I also think, and I'm sure many here would agree, that code developed on the public's dime should be 100% open, insofar as it may be possible, but this is a promising first step.)

I would agree that the default should be open; that was an extremely common position in the public comments. However, the final policy did not do that. I hope there will be a future policy that will.

The People’s Code (White House blog)

Posted Aug 10, 2016 11:40 UTC (Wed) by karkhaz (subscriber, #99844) [Link] (2 responses)

I'm surprised that such code doesn't already fall under the definition of "works of the United States Government," meaning that it would ought to be in the public domain. Does anybody know why programs developed by the USG is not in this category? Pretty much everything else created by a USG employee falls under that definition...

The Source Code Policy gives a few examples of programs already released as open source software; one of those is the "We The People" online petition service, released here [1]. That code is GNU GPL 2+, which is obviously more restrictive than public domain...they do indicate in the report that any license approved by the FSF or OSI would be fine.

[1] https://github.com/WhiteHouse/petitions

The People’s Code (White House blog)

Posted Aug 10, 2016 12:14 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> Does anybody know why programs developed by the USG is not in this category?

Because "developed by the USG" is not the same as "developed by a contractor for the USG"

In the latter case, the copyright on the code can be transferred to the USG, which can lead to the current situation.

The People’s Code (White House blog)

Posted Aug 10, 2016 17:21 UTC (Wed) by david.a.wheeler (subscriber, #72896) [Link]

The vast majority of software developed using US government funds are written by contractors, not by government employees as part of their official duties. In addition, when government employees do develop software, it is a "work of the US government" - it need not be released, but if it is, it normally has no copyright in the US (there may be a copyright assertion outside the US, and there are special exceptions for employees of NIST and the US Postal Service). For more about releasing software as OSS if it's developed using US federal government funds, see my paper Publicly Releasing Open Source Software Developed for the U.S. Government.