[Discuss] Govt Source Code Policy

[johnhall2.0 at gmail.com (John Hall)]

https://www.usa.gov/government-works
It would be great to hear from an IP lawyer on this.
All licenses are attached through copyright laws and federal government
works cannot have a copyright so can not be released under a license. There
are literally no restrictions except those noted at the above link.

Is there already an organization,or division an existing one, that acts as
a conservancy for open source contributions to US government works and also
promotes use of open licensing by state and local governments promoting
cooperation between them?  If not what would make sense?
What organizations are there already involved in the e-government
ecosystem?
Should it be global or form a consortium of national and regional groups?

I do not know what law would apply to a derivative. Perhaps an organization
could copyright the derivative portions - open source community
contributions, and apply the Apache or GPL license to the contributed
portions. If a project starts under the GPL license for example and the
government uses and extends it then I believe it's still GPL, or this is a
giant hole in the GPL license and would need fixing.


On Fri, Mar 25, 2016 at 5:18 PM, MBR <mbr at arlsoft.com> wrote:

> The critical piece of information missing is what license they plan to
> release it under.  Will it be GPL?  Some other GPL-compatible license?
> Some GPL-incompatible license?  Public domain?  They don't say.
>
> But they are asking for public comment.  As important as it may be to get
> them to use the right terminology (Free Software instead of Open Source), I
> think it's far more important to try to get them to specify that the code
> will be licensed under some version of the GPL.  I'm sure the FSF would
> prefer we advocate for GPLv3, but could we live with GPLv2 if that was the
> best we could get?
>
>    Mark Rosenthal
>
>
>
> On 3/25/16 3:33 PM, Greg Rundlett (freephile) wrote:
>
>> The US Fed. Govt. is proposing a pilot program to release at least 20% of
>> newly developed custom code as 'OSS'.  https://sourcecode.cio.gov/
>> They're
>> accepting comments now.  And since it's hosted on GitHub, you "comment"
>> via
>> the issue queue, and you can also fork the project and issue a pull
>> request.
>>
>> I forked it and created a pull request.
>> https://github.com/WhiteHouse/source-code-policy/pulls proposing to use
>> the
>> term 'Free Software' in place of 'Open Source'
>>
>> If the government actually goes through with 'open sourcing' their work,
>> it's actually a giant corporate handout because companies will have
>> greater
>> access to publicly funded works that they can then incorporate into
>> proprietary works.
>>
>> What do you think?
>>
>>
>> Greg Rundlett
>> https://eQuality-Tech.com
>> https://freephile.org
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>>
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