I'm pretty sure that, assuming you're a government employee, any work you create that would normally be covered by copyright as part of your job is public domain. There's no license legally possible.
Yeah, absolutely. We make that argument often. In fact, the software we open-source is technically supposed to be released as public domain (as in, no license applied) and often is if people are doing things right.
But that doesn't mean it has to be hosted and released online. Many agencies work under the "not going to release anything until we get a FOIA request" model. Just because it is public domain doesn't mean it is public.
Want my email address? I'll just send FOIAs all day long through Muckrock if I know what I should be asking for (and pushing the results up to Github and the Internet Archive).
Honestly, I'll take it. More than likely it will be something on a CD or DVD, though. And if I get a PDF of 300kloc, then it's an indicator that I've hit pay dirt, and they don't want me to see something, or are very reluctant to give it up.
All kinds of things. For years as a business owner I used FOIAs to gain some insight into government contracting work. It was expensive but I think worth it. Lately I've been asking for information about military operations and projects that I know have happened or exist, but that no one knows about (this is very, very hard to do, btw, and I don't recommend it since you'll probably just waste your time). When I hear about classified projects -- for example from Snowden's release -- I FOIA for information that might be tangential but unclassified. That's how you find bombshells, btw. Most of the time these days, I get the "cannot confirm or deny" replies, or "we could not find material responsive to your request". I have some very cool FOIA responses from from the NSA from the six months before Snowden dropped his bomb. "We can't confirm or deny ... National security" and the like. I'm not sure how to say this, but due to my network, I had some insight into what was happening. Don't get the wrong idea about me, but anyway, those replies (one of them dated on "the apocalypse" of 21 December 2012) are fairly frame-able. As I said above, FOIA'ing as a commercial requester was expensive. As a private person asking for noncommercial reasons, you can waive a lot of the fees.
Overall I think the FOIA is a great utility. Most big name federal agencies actually have FOIA liaisons that will try to help if they can. Some, of course, are just as douche-y as you would imagine (e.g. NSA, NRO, CIA). Though I did have a few good interactions with CIA FOIAs, mostly bad ones though. The FOIA actually says in the law that the reviewing official should look at a FOIA as "what can we release?" and not as "what can we hide?", and you need to tell people this more often than you would like. I actually used a FOIA to get my DNA information from the military's secret-but-not-secret DNA database. It's a database of every service member's DNA, and ostensibly is for identifying remains. That was actually very difficult, because nobody had ever FOIA'ed the Army's "funerary affairs" office for DNA information, and so they were under the impression they could just ignore my requests. That taught me a lot and was actually fun in a weird way. You just have to persist, and escalate if you don't agree with the response or don't get any. FOIAs are serious business, and most people in the US government are people just like you and me, and want to help you find what you're looking for. Though, some people in government -- like any other community -- are bullies on a power trip. Wow, sorry for the wall of text!
Well (as another Federal coder), one problem is the unfunded mandate issue. If this comes with resources to maintain public repos and updates, sure. Otherwise, if someone emails me I share the latest snapshot but only as my time and duties permit.
I realize that setting up an automatic integration between your existing source control system and github might be nontrivial (eg if you are using an unpopular source control system for which no easy conversion to git) so this won't work for everyone without funding (and it would be nice if some were made available for that)
But if you already use git (or something like SVN or hg which can easily interoperate with git) or don't currently use any SCM (!) then just publishing to github is a nobrainer.
I generally agree. I've seen a few challenges to this perspective. 1) Some agencies do not think using 3rd party services like github is allowed. 2) Different groups make the initial code release pretty time consuming (as, in part, it should be) as, through time, the history may have accumulated secrets/keys/other sensitive material. So very thorough reviews are sometimes required. 3) Some agencies allow the use of github (and the like), but make the process of getting code up there extremely challenging. For example, some groups require all changes to code to go through the same internal review process as traditional communication, like a scientific publication or press release (internal review, multiple levels of management, etc).
Of course, the last one is the worst. A lot of groups are getting their act together when it comes to starting open-source, but it is met with a lot of skepticism.
Apparently things are a bit more complicated than this, since works created by government employees are in the public domain in the US, but foreign copyrights are still held by the government. Unless the software is released with a FOSS license where applicable, I don't think public domain government code is compatible with other FOSS licenses (which are generally worldwide).
Even if it weren't the case that the US government held full copyrights abroad, it's still something of a problem because some jurisdictions do not have a concept of public domain - this is why the concept CC-0 licensing comes into play (it's public domain with a permissive license fallback).
Of course, this isn't the case when you are contracted by the government to develop software for them, which is a huge issue in my eyes. I'm not going to say let's ban shrinkwrapped software in the government (as much as I'd like to see everything the government uses be open source), but I think it's reasonable to require any contracted out to be released under on open license to the public, specifically because it ISN'T just off the shelf software.
>>Of course, this isn't the case when you are contracted by the government to develop software for them...I'm not going to say let's ban shrinkwrapped software in the government
Shrinkwrapped software != bespoke software that is contracted to be developed for the government
IMO any software that is contracted to be developed by the government should be public domain, if the government "owns" the software then in reality the public "owns" it... after all the government is "for the people, by the people" right...
This does preclude the government from licensing the USE of software (like Windows, Office, etc) that is a completely different debate. However if the government is contracting with a company for the company to build custom software the exclusive use of the government they yes that should be Public domain.
