Public policy colleagues: A proposal instructing U.S. federal government agencies to release some source code as open-source has been issued for public comment. The core bit is to aim to release 20% of the custom code they develop, for a three-year pilot period.
The proposal is 15 pages if viewed as a PDF. It comes from the White House's Office of Management and Budget (OMB) which can coordinate/instruct the other agencies.
This, helpfully, means one can review how other people see the issues of interest.
Today is the last day for comments. I will be commenting favorably. The proposal has simmered and struggled for a long time; the main hope is to move forward with something. Anything. (I used to think it was better for agencies to decide for themselves, but this didn't work. I have watched for ten years in horror. So now it may be commanded centrally. So be it.)
I think the key thing to comment is that for the government staff to officially join in with existing projects like Wikimedia ones is not difficult and potentially very productive. Whereas, to release own big unique custom projects is (a) administratively hard, and (b) not broadly useful, since they aren't part of a previously established open-source ecology with a known demand for them.
I will be very interested to see the views of others on the comments list or by email.
-- peter meyer / user:econterms / Wikimedia DC