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The Army's decision to formalize its open-source software development policy is paying off. At least two major projects have benefited from the policy announced this spring, with open source helping to speed development and save taxpayer dollars, according to officials from the U.S. Army Research Laboratory.
"Open source can reduce development time and lower overall costs, resulting in a win-win situation for the Army and the U.S. taxpayer," said ARL Deputy Chief Scientist Mary Harper.
When it comes to defense agencies embracing open-source software development, the Army is hardly at the cutting edge. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency paved the way with the launch of its GitHub open-source community in 2014. The Navy issued a guidance on the use of open-source code as early as 2007.
Still, ARL leaders say they expect to reap big benefits by formalizing their approach to open source, a term used to describe software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be shared and modified.
[...] Looking ahead, ARL leaders say their explicit embrace of an open-source approach should be a boon to the other military services. But they aren't yet offering insight into just what those evolutions might look like.
"It's extremely difficult to guess how the code might be used or leveraged by others," Harper said. "ARL's belief is that [the U.S. Army Tank Automotive Research Development and Engineering Center] and other groups will leverage the code as they see fit to support mission and potentially improve ARL's code at the same time. This has been the case for extremely popular open-source projects such as the Linux kernel, and ARL hopes to leverage this power as well."
Source: https://www.federaltimes.com/it-networks/2017/08/14/army-reaps-benefits-of-open-source-policy/
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 18 2017, @05:54AM (1 child)
You have written quite a bit about copyright for software written for a US Govt contract.
It's too bad you don't know your subject.
Here are the facts, excerpted from
http://www.mccarter.com/Protecting-IP-When-Contracting-With-the-Government-08-31-2010/ [mccarter.com]
Copyrighted Material
Contractors may also retain ownership of any copyrighted material developed or delivered under a government contract.
(...)
In exchange for the contractor's copyright in material produced during performance of a government contract,
the government is typically granted a non-exclusive, irrevocable license to use, modify, reproduce, release,
perform, display, or disclose the copyrighted work by or on behalf of the United States throughout the world.
End excerpt.
Notice there is nothing there about public domain. If the contract was written such that the contractor retains copyright, the govt generally can do whatever it wants with the software, even up to releasing it to the public, but that doesn't give the public the right to legally modify and redistribute the software (i.e., put it in public domain).
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday August 18 2017, @10:51AM
It depends on if the software was contracted or work-for-hire. In work-for-hire situations, he's absolutely correct; you do not get copyright on your work. This generally isn't going to be the case for software contractors though as we tend to charge way, way more if you want something written that we can never reuse parts of.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.