The White House has released its Federal Source Code policy that promotes reuse of new source code developed by government agencies across the federal government.
The new policy also sets up a pilot program “that requires agencies, when commissioning new custom software, to release at least 20 percent of new custom-developed code as Open Source Software (OSS) for three years,” Tony Scott, U.S. CIO and Anne E. Rung, chief acquisition officer, wrote in a memorandum to heads of departments and agencies on Monday.
The federal government spends every year over US$6 billion on software through more than 42,000 transactions, but agencies that procure custom-developed source code do not necessarily make their new code broadly available for reuse by the federal government.
