Question

Taking shs’s question a step further… Why isn’t all government sponsored software open source? I can see excluding some for security purposes, but the rest? Didn’t we as tax payers already pay for it? The government has no rights, only the people, so how can the government license something? Who is the licensee? It would be the public since the government is the people.

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To those of you that think the government has rights, I would urge you to read The United States Constitution.

Answer 1

My wishful thinking is that if the software is created by government employees or custom software created for the government by a contractor, it should be automatically in the public domain (as all government published documents are). If the government bought the software from a company, even if it included some customization, it should remain closed-source. You run into a bit of a grey area where it was developed by contractors for the government, but could then be sold as a commercial product (if anyone was stupid enough to buy software created for the government… see The Daily WTF for references)… I don’t know how to resolve that, but despite my desire for FOSS, I think it best to err on the side of the business in this case.

I also think the government should be required to use existing open source software if it is a viable competitor to a closed-source solution. It would save some tax dollars and promote government openness (not in the software sense, though that would be good too).

How do we make it happen? 😀