Earlier quoted context omitted.
What usually happens is that it doesn't get released at all. It isn't worth the effort. I've got tons of code I've written over the years that, if I could just throw it onto github, I would. But since it would take me six weeks of pain, I don't. Some of that code I'm kind of proud of, or was at the time I wrote it, anyway. I wrote an rviz app a decade before ROS took off.
Would there be some way of just automatically releasing everything in a git repo after X days (30? 60? 90?) unless some action is taken? Commit/push like normal, and some other process pushes to a public repo after X days, but anyone can review and block in the meantime for security reasons when needed?
It could happen, but it would take something like the Secretary of Defense ordering it. Or a White House directive. The folks at my level, or at any level I can actually talk to, don't have the authority. The thing is, they aren't making these policies and procedures up just to be dense. There are real, hard and fast laws and department-wide policies that require the system to look the way it does.