Email Comment: Support for Open Source Licensing / Open by Default

[OMBPublicComments]

[Email Comment, received on 4/15/2016, at 11:55PM ET]

Hi. I am an American citizen and my comment on the source code policy is the following:

(My understanding is that under current laws all code produced by government employees is public domain, and that this policy only applies to code produced by contracted parties hired to code for the government. Perhaps the OMB should make this fact more clear.)

• On the github feedback thing, I've seen debates about how much source code to release. Like most, I agree that as much as possible should be released, if not all. It would be difficult to draw lines and quantify things if they were only going to release a certain percentage. Also, there is no utilitarian reason to keep anything closed-source.
• Open-sourced code should not be hosted on Github, or any commercial service, as this would in my opinion be too much government interference in the marketplace. More importantly, it would defeat the purpose of open sourcing it, since the whole point of open source is to make code as accessible as possible, and putting it on a commercial service would require people to go through that service, which is an unfair burden and gives Github too much control over people's access to the code which they are entitled to have since their taxes paid for it. There are plenty of ways the code could be hosted in a decentralized or otherwise noncommercial/market-neutral manner.
• I would prefer GPL3 as the license for open-sourced software, since it is copyleft. Being copyleft makes it more friendly to the businesses the government would be contracting with to produce the code, since their competitors wouldn't be able to leach off their efforts without contributing back. Copyleft is also more in sync with the general open source goal/philosphy of accessibility, because non-copyleft open source code can still be closed down and have its access restricted - copyleft ensures that the code will always be publicly available, including newer versions and pieces of it used in other programs. It would not be fair to taxpayers or to the government contractors if third parties could redistribute the software while refusing to pass forward accessibility to the source.
• Also, a lot of open source developers are dissuaded from contributing to non-copyleft open source software, since they can't guarantee that it will always remain open.
• That being said, any open source license would be vastly preferable to public domain, which would in turn be vastly preferable to restricted code.
• The government should perhaps establish connections with the governments of other countries, to share code with them, develop joint FOSS solutions to common needs, and facilitate the sharing and publishing of government FOSS around the world. Cooperation between governments in this area could save all countries involved lots of money and resources, while providing public goods to the entire world as an externality at no extra cost.
• I know this is not part of the policy, but while I'm talking about this stuff, I might as well also say that the government would save a lot of money in the long run if they used open source software as much as possible for everything they did. This is particularly important (in fact, critical and necessary) for voting machine software and other software that is intimately involved with people's constitutional rights. I don't think it is constitutional to count votes or declare guilty/innocent with secret algorithms. Frankly it is a gross violation of people's rights as citizens, and I hope the law would catch up with the technology so we could have transparent and accountable systems in these matters.

Thank you for reading!
Nicholas Pontillo