On Fri, Mar 25, 2016 at 4:59 PM, Greg Rundlett (freephile) < g...@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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