New Federal Policy Says Federal Code Must Be Open Source

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The Federal Office of Management and Budget has started a three-year pilot that requires all agencies commissioning new custom software make at least twenty percent of their computer code open source.

The policy, which was laid out on Monday in a joint memo from US government CIO Tony Scott and chief acquisition officer Anne E Rung, draws attention to the waste that occurs when agencies purchase substantially similar code because other agencies haven't made their code discoverable or available. In response to these constraints on sharing, the policy aims to ensure all agencies make custom-developed source code broadly available for reuse across the whole of government.
 
Oh 20%, oh how high!

I work for a software company that makes proprietary closed-source software, but due to the fact that OSS components are free we use a bunch of them (easily at least 20%, probably more like 40%), all using non-copyleft licenses like BSD. So I don't think it would be difficult for any software company to comply with this. For example, anything written in Java could include a copy of the Apache Java Runtime and qualify for this requirement.
 
I predict this decision will have zero impact on government acquisitions, and will only serve as a resume point for someone.
 
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