[Discuss] Govt Source Code Policy

[John Hall]

The FAQ is from the previous links goes into a great deal of detail but
unfortunately I don't have the time to parse through it.
I found it useful to search for "software" on the FAQ page.
http://www.cendi.gov/publications/04-8copyright.html#toc30

On Fri, Mar 25, 2016 at 6:15 PM, John Hall <johnhall2.0 at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> 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
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Discuss mailing list
>>> Discuss at blu.org
>>> http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
>>>
>>>
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>
>