[Discuss] Govt Source Code Policy

[mbr at arlsoft.com (MBR)]

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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