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 and invitation for public comment is here:
https://sourcecode.cio.gov/
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.
Comments are invited in a github-issues format:
https://github.com/whitehouse/source-code-policy/issues
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