Free software in government

See wp:Copyright status of work by the U.S. government

Just one piece of that, the 'information community' is ~ $150 Billion dollars.

"CENDI is a volunteer-powered membership organization that serves the federal information community - that is, all those who create, manage, aggregate, organize, and provide access to federally--section of federal data and publication providers, including libraries, data centers, aggregators, information technology developers, and content management providers."

CENDI provides some info on copyright as it applies to the US Government http://www.cendi.gov/publications/04-8copyright.html

The IT Sector of the US Federal Government is $82 Billion in FY 2015 https://www.itdashboard.gov/drupal/

So what are "We The People" getting for our money? Specifically, what are these expenditures producing in terms of technology freedom? Very little. Almost nothing. But we can work for change.

The White House is considering an "open source" initiative to publish more code under an open license. I'm proposing an even better option: Free Software by default. https://github.com/WhiteHouse/source-code-policy/pull/78

Status Quo

Before 1710, there was no such thing as copyright. The way that government works are treated, since the founding of the U.S., is that the government can't compete with the citizens it represents. Thus, the government can not own copyright. Instead, copyright and other "intellectual property" is transferred to the people through a process called 'technology transfer'. However, that transfer is almost exclusively to corporations, so it's sadly not to the citizenry unless you call it some "trickle down" theory.

For an example, consider the U. S. Dept. of Energy. They have an Office of the Assistant General Counsel for Technology Transfer and Intellectual Property that transfers these assets 'to the private sector'. Here is their Intellectual Property Overview and ]Technology Transfer Overview

Some developer and/or public resources

1. https://www.data.gov/labs/
2. https://www.itdashboard.gov/
3. https://www.usaspending.gov/Pages/Default.aspx
4. https://www.codeforamerica.org/ is led by Microsoft. To wit: the code sharing section is labelled "borrow and steal for the greater good" #doingItWrong But anyway, included here for completeness.
5. Be Open from Day One - 2011 article by Karl Fogel on Civic Commons
6. Open Source (Almost) Everything - 2011 post by Tom Preston-Werner (co-founder of GitHub) He advocates for the MIT license because the GPL is too 'dogmatic' (and interferes with his selling software licenses).
7. The missed opportunity that is the White House Open Source Policy - 2016 by Ben Balter (Attorney, developer, product manager, GitHub employee) repost of this article
8. https://fcw.com/home.aspx FCW - 'The Business of Federal Technology'
9. U.S. Department of Defense - Chief Information Officer Open Source Software FAQ

Free software available now

1. The White House [[[Drupal]] (licensed under the GPLv2 or later). Public Domain software and GPL software can happily co-exist.
2. DARPA Open Catalog