Government Open Source Code Repositories
Moving the discussion thread on currently on the comment wall for the group to a Discussion Forum (see posts of week of January 9, 2012)
Key points in our discussion thus far:
- We're excited NASA is making progress on their open source initiatives http://code.nasa.gov
- It's important to understand the licensing terms before one assumes you can push your work into the public domain, OSS licenses are not all created equally and have different terms for IP and contribution (reference spacebook project built upon Life Ray) NASA in general is looking at these issue.
- NASA is starting to use resources like GITHUB for some of their projects
- Canada has a place to do this now http://ircan.gc.ca
- The US has tried this before and not succeeded (cite: core.gov - it's off the air now)
- Does government need their own repository for non-sensitive apps?
- Is there a need for forge.gov?
- Could Civic Commons be a place for this to happen?
I'll weigh in on Civic Commons next.
Tags: collaboration, development, forges, github, govIT, open, software, source
Replies to This Discussion
-
Permalink Reply by Mark Dixon on -
Cool...I look forward to the discussion. I have started to work on a business plan and funding for a hybrid organization to build software for local government. I have a number of colleagues and clients ready to help if we can get funded.
Also, California has passed a law that went into effect Jan 1 2012 that allows "flexible purpose" corporations...which could be another way to go...
I look forward to the discussion...
-
-
Permalink Reply by Megan on -
Excellent. Thanks much. I would think another issue would be cost, as there will be a community of developers (and in some cases an international community) that build around each specific application. Issues like code updates, version control, issues tracking, etc. become increasingly important as the community grows. A great example of this is NASA WorldWind. I believe their model has changed significantly over the years, so best to be flexible and willing to change strategy based on new/better models and information. Any and all suggestions for best practices in 2012 welcomed.
-
-
Permalink Reply by Lisa Wilcox on -
Mark, I would love to hear more about California's law.
I too look forward to the discussion..
-
-
Permalink Reply by Gabriel Cossette on -
Thanks for creating this separate thread with good key points Deborah! This is indeed a very interesting subject.
I do want to answer Megan's last question though:
"I suppose in the case of Spacebook creating a mini "fork" of our own Liferay-based code would make some sense, as the developer community would likely grow around the specific application, not so much around the Liferay portal itself. Can you talk me through the implications a bit more?"
As I said, if we don't want/can't give our intellectual property to the Liferay company (as required by the Liferay project), we can publish our code modifications to a separate repository under the LGPL license. This create kind of a mini "fork" of the Liferay project.
IMO, it might be realistic to do so when our code modifications aren't that major or if they are mostly separate from the core (like themes, plugins or branding).
However, if we made a lot of changes to the core, problems arise when we want to update our fork with the latest version of the original project. We then have a lot of work to do like merging code and rewriting part of it. Same thing when there is security patches and such... All in all, we lose the codebase maintenance done by the Liferay developers.
Just some thoughts to weight in regarding this decision...
-
Tools & Resources
© 2012 Created by GovLoop.
