The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) faces unique challenges in open sourcing its code. Unlike most software projects, code written by U.S. Federal government employees typically doesn’t have copyright protections under U.S. and some international laws. This can make it hard to attach an open source license to our code, and our team here at Defense Digital Service wants to find a solution. Read about our journey so far here.
If you are a DoD or Military Department employee with a project you want hosted on Code.mil, get the conversation going by submitting your information here.
The DoD is charged with protecting our citizens and national security. We have an incredibly diverse portfolio spanning from communications, logistics, education, healthcare, and even the next generation of GPS (yes, the GPS!) that supports billions of people across the globe.
We need your help in contributing to our projects to build better products and services for the American people.
Meet with developers across the DoD who have been tasked with America’s highest priority missions and help build upon their work. We believe that software created by the government should be shared with the public, and we want to collaborate with civic minded peers to make this happen.
We heard your feedback and updated our open source strategy -- check it out here.
We’ve drafted CONTRIBUTING.md and INTENT.md so the DoD can participate in the open source and free software communities, even where we may not have copyright. This lets us harness the depth and breadth of talent in the open source and free software communities to improve our software and make our code available for public use.
The INTENT.md file explains the copyright and license status of the project being released, and the CONTRIBUTING.md file describes the contribution process for developers. When copyright is applicable, we intend to use widely adopted licenses in the open source and free software communities.
We want your help to continue making our open source strategy better. Our philosophy is continuous iteration. We encourage everybody to open an issue (or a pull request!) with your suggestions on how to continue improving CONTRIBUTING.md and INTENT.md.