191–200 of 277 posts
I'm in favor of the transparency this would confer, but it's probably not in our best national interests to be potentially giving away state of the art software for running large governments. The code is of minimal utility to individual citizens who have no need to run large governments, but can be hugely beneficial to our competing nations.
Would it be possible to FOIA the source code and commit history?
I'm in favor of the transparency this would confer, but it's probably not in our best national interests to be potentially giving away state of the art software for running large governments. The code is of minimal utility to individual citizens who have no need to run large governments, but can be hugely beneficial to our competing nations.
Psst, it's not our state of the art software that's holding this ball of mud together.
Government scientist here. IANAL, but my understanding is that all software written by US government civil servants is in the public domain. It cannot be copyrighted or otherwise licensed (although the government can patent things). This does not necessarily mean that it is available to the public, as noted in the other comments; it may be classified, considered For Official Use Only, or restricted from release by IT…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are some things the IRS shouldn't release like their fraud detection or anything related to deciding who should get audited. Releasing that risks big bad actors working around the limitations of whatever algorithms it contains.
> There are some things the IRS shouldn't release like their fraud detection or anything related to deciding who should get audited That's perhaps a good reason for that part of the software to not be published and/or FOIA disclosable, but that's orthogonal to how it is licensed. If it's an original government work now it would be public domain (which is more open than open source), but still potentially confidential…
Government scientist here. IANAL, but my understanding is that all software written by US government civil servants is in the public domain. It cannot be copyrighted or otherwise licensed (although the government can patent things). This does not necessarily mean that it is available to the public, as noted in the other comments; it may be classified, considered For Official Use Only, or restricted from release by IT…
Mostly sortof true, but there are lots of complications. I've delved into this. For lots of detail on the current situation, see my paper, "Publicly Releasing Open Source Software Developed for the U.S. Government" by David A. Wheeler, https://www.csiac.org/journal-article/publicly-releasing-ope... In almost all cases, if a US Federal employee writes software as part of his/her official duties, then there is no copyr…
So the good news is that any government contractor overseeing a contract should be able to release it as OSS, if ve wants. Bad news is that it’s effort and risk to do it correctly.
Government scientist here. IANAL, but my understanding is that all software written by US government civil servants is in the public domain. It cannot be copyrighted or otherwise licensed (although the government can patent things). This does not necessarily mean that it is available to the public, as noted in the other comments; it may be classified, considered For Official Use Only, or restricted from release by IT…
I used to work in a state government job as a student intern, and they said they wanted an internal directory for some various tasks. You can think of it like an inventory manager sort of website, purely on our intranet. The mad lad my lead was, said we would need a database for retaining some of the basic data we needed to keep track of. Nothing all that special, just a few tables, and by nature nothing sensitive wo…
This is common enough across a variety of organizations (I've certainly run into the same issue at several large-ish companies) and isn't necessarily unreasonable... if IT also provides a process for getting what you need with their oversight/help (bonus if some part of the IT team actually has skills to do audits rather than cargo culting off a checklist).
Government scientist here. IANAL, but my understanding is that all software written by US government civil servants is in the public domain. It cannot be copyrighted or otherwise licensed (although the government can patent things). This does not necessarily mean that it is available to the public, as noted in the other comments; it may be classified, considered For Official Use Only, or restricted from release by IT…
I am working on this problem and contributing to https://code.mil . This project explains to DoD managers /how/ to set up an open source policy. It's going to be a long process, but we can do this!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used to be a contractor and worked on a web application distributed across multiple web servers. We needed a state server at the time to hold some cached information and share it among the servers. Now there was a rule that said a web server was not directly allowed to communicate with the database. Okay I get it, that makes sense. The state server we were going to use to store some application metadata had the wor…
I'm having to switch CentOS servers over to RHEL servers because... support(?) Some state work got in trouble a few years back because they'd updated guidelines that no applications could be on the same machine as a database server. Enforced separation, for security. Having enough staff and management to distribute that message to people dealing with the apps and servers didn't seem to be a requirement, however. And.…
Government scientist here. IANAL, but my understanding is that all software written by US government civil servants is in the public domain. It cannot be copyrighted or otherwise licensed (although the government can patent things). This does not necessarily mean that it is available to the public, as noted in the other comments; it may be classified, considered For Official Use Only, or restricted from release by IT…
Mostly sortof true, but there are lots of complications. I've delved into this. For lots of detail on the current situation, see my paper, "Publicly Releasing Open Source Software Developed for the U.S. Government" by David A. Wheeler, https://www.csiac.org/journal-article/publicly-releasing-ope... In almost all cases, if a US Federal employee writes software as part of his/her official duties, then there is no copyr…
Clearly, they don't want new ideas.