[Esip-opensource] New open government initiatives include "Open source as a government standard"

[Goodwin, Scott (HQ-CI000) via Esip-opensource]

http://fcw.com/articles/2014/09/25/open-gov-initiatives.aspx



  *   Open source as a government standard. The plan also sets a deadline of the end of 2015 for creating and implementing an open-source software policy across government. The policy will support improved access to software code developed for the federal government. The plan also says the administration will use more open and transparent processes to design and develop digital services, conduct pilot projects and better understand user demand. "Using and contributing back to open-source software can fuel innovation, lower costs and benefit the public," the plan states.


This should be very interesting. Things I’d like to see:

- Standard policy that allows federal and contract workers to directly contribute on open source software projects after a streamlined approval process.

- A list of accepted open source software licenses that the Agencies may release under — perhaps any license that meets Open Source Initiative (OSI) standards and is approved by OSI, and a requirement that precludes Agencies from creating and using ‘open source’ licenses that they themselves created (yes, I’m looking at us, NASA — there is no need for the NASA Open Source Agreement as a license in today’s world).

- A default FAR requirement in all new contracts that all software written under contract must be provided to the Federal Government and releasable by the Federal Government / Agencies as open source.

- A requirement that an open source license must be assigned to new software at the start of any software development, so that it can be released early rather than when it’s ‘finished’. This one will be tricky, because some software we can’t release outside of the government due to ITAR/EAR and national security restrictions.

Obviously things that are ITAR / EAR would be embargoed, but there should be a straightforward way for anyone to be able to determine whether a software package might be ITAR / EAR — maybe a checklist of questions about the software that, if any of the items are checked off as true, it requires review by legal.

Another area that would help: default policy that requires sharing of source code within and across Federal Agencies. Yes, it’s very difficult to provide source code from NASA to any other Agency without going through the software release process. Not that I’m against software release reviews — it’s just that the process is burdensome, partly because our lawyers and others involved in release are very busy with other work. In the last update to NASA software release policy, I asked that we be allowed to share code across our own Centers, so that a component of our ISS Program at one Center could provide software they developed to a different component of the same ISS Program at a different Center(!).

Sharing between Agencies might require a ‘Federal Government’ software license — I don’t like to create licenses, but for code that cannot be released as open source or otherwise provided to the public, or foreign nationals, but that can be provided to other Agencies, having a standard government ‘internal’ license that follows the code to other Agencies and that lays out what can and can’t be done w/r to release of that software would be helpful.


/s.

Scott Goodwin
Chief Technology Officer
Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Washington, DC





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