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posted by martyb on Saturday March 17 2018, @11:39AM   Printer-friendly
from the information-wants-to-be-free dept.

The US Department of Defense is in the process of releasing all of its custom software under Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) licenses with a deadline of June for getting under way. Most of the barriers so far have been legal and policy ones, not technical.

As part of the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act, the Defense Department has until June to start moving much of its custom-developed software source code to a central repository and begin managing and licensing it via open source methods.

The mandate might prove daunting for an organization in which open source practices are relatively scarce, especially considering that, until recently, there was no established open source playbook for the federal government. That's begun to change, however, with the Office of Management and Budget's code.gov, and its DoD corollary, code.mil, run by the Defense Digital Service (DDS).

The fact that such software is actually under public domain inside the US adds a small twist to the release process.

From Federal News Radio : Amid congressional mandate to open source DoD's software code, Code.mil serves as guidepost.


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  • (Score: 2) by lentilla on Sunday March 18 2018, @06:22AM (3 children)

    by lentilla (1770) on Sunday March 18 2018, @06:22AM (#654361)

    anything they wrote from scratch is in the public domain. Everything else remains under the license it was acquired under

    Quite correct.

    It becomes problematic when you start mixing things up (and subsequently want to share/release the program). Specific to GPL code, you can read their FAQ [gnu.org] on the topic.

    Copy/paste behaviours from the distant past can cause problems here. Let's say you wrote an application for your department that was intended for internal use. 90% of the job can be sorted with public domain code, 5% is solved with some GPL'd functions (copied and pasted from somewhere on the Internet) and the final 5% is glue code. This is pretty normal behaviour for a programmer - similar to a bricklayer using pre-cast bricks for a job rather than running their own personal brickworks.

    So far, everything is great. The program works and does it thing. Then; one day; someone decides to release the program (sell it or give it away - doesn't matter). Now we have a problem. Which part is public domain, and which is covered by the GPL? Assuming it's a single "program", you'd either have to re-implement the GPL portion, split that part out, or distribute the entire work as GPL. Likely the original programmer has moved on to greener pastures and it becomes very hard to determine what is what, buried under the sands of time.

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  • (Score: 2) by canopic jug on Sunday March 18 2018, @07:28AM (2 children)

    by canopic jug (3949) Subscriber Badge on Sunday March 18 2018, @07:28AM (#654374) Journal

    I thought that was all settled a very long time ago in the courts. If you add to a program, the additions are under the license of that program whether under GPL, Apache 2, or Crowley.

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    • (Score: 2) by lentilla on Sunday March 18 2018, @10:25AM

      by lentilla (1770) on Sunday March 18 2018, @10:25AM (#654417)

      I imagine that is the case, although the copyright will rest with the author of each component part.

      My hypothetical (and all too common) convolution was what happens when a programmer uses "a bit of this, and a bit of that" to roll something together, and then their program "grows legs" because people find it useful and subsequently improve it. Now we have an amalgam of software where it can be impossible to tell what might have been (for example) public domain and what might have been GPL. In that case, I believe it would be OK to release the new work as GPL, with public domain components, but I do not believe the reverse would be possible (public domain, with GPL components). So it is not as simple as "follow the original license" if there happens to be more than one original license.

      I imagine that very situation would give lawyers nightmares. (Well, the ones at the company considering releasing source code at any rate - other lawyers no doubt dream of dollar signs.)

    • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday March 18 2018, @10:30AM

      If you want to release it, yes. There is effectively no license on the new code unless you decide to distribute it externally though and even then it needs to be somewhat tightly mixed in with the GPL'd code for it to be required to be licensed under the GPL. Writing a plugin for a program that is GPL'd is generally not enough to trigger the GPL requirement in your own code and vice versa, for instance.

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