By GovFresh · April 13, 2016
The White House extended the Federal Source Code Policy comment period to April 18 and, to date, there are 147 comments with much of the discussion centered around licensing and security.
Open culture organizations, enterprise software providers, key open source advocates and federal agencies have contributed to the discussion, including Sunlight Foundation, Free Software Foundation, Mozilla, Creative Commons, GitHub, Electronic Frontier Foundation, U.S. Air Force, Department of Homeland Security, Open Source Health Record Alliance, Red Hat, Open Tech Strategies.
Requiring software to be open source by default builds a culture that supports and amplifies the benefits of open source. When it’s the default approach, developing in the open becomes second nature, rather than a separate process to follow for an arbitrary amount of projects. Measuring the amount of code released into the open as required by the 20% policy adds unnecessary overhead and burden to the process of developing open source software, and inhibits an open source-based workflow from becoming more widely adopted.