US government draft to publish publicly financed software under Free Software licenses

[Robin Eklind]

 > Nice, that echoes the recent french CADA decision that recognizes
software source code as a "publicly discloseable document", that just
was validated by an administrative court:
 >
 > 
http://www.april.org/le-tribunal-administratif-valide-lavis-de-la-cada-les-codes-sources-sont-des-documents-administratif
(sorry no translation yet)
 >
 > On the 1st of April (no, that's not a joke), the tax administration will
release the source code of the tax calculation software they wrote, and
even organize a hackathon around it.
 >
 > 
http://www.nextinpact.com/news/98981-le-fisc-ouvrira-code-source-son-calculateur-d-impots-1er-avril.htm
 >
 > François.

That's great!

This also echoes active work done in Sweden.

The parliamentary committees of the Swedish government is currently in 
the process of finalising a statement of opinion regarding the use of 
open standards and open source software in government agencies [1,2].

The analysis leading up to the statement of opinion was conducted in 
2009 by the Swedish Government Official Reports (SOU) [3,4] agency. 
Below follows a set of extracts from the conducted analysis.

"Myndigheterna ska i första hand välja öppna standarder och alltid 
överväga öppen programvara." [5]

Which roughly translates to:

"Government agencies should if possible use open standards and always 
consider using open source software." [5]

and

"Den offentliga förvaltningens e-tjänster bör i så stor utsträckning som 
möjligt bygga på öppna standarder samt använda sig av programvara som 
bygger på öppen källkod och lösningar som stegvis frigör förvaltningen 
från beroendet av enskilda plattformar och lösningar." (SOU 2009:86, 
page 163) [6].

Which roughly translates to:

"The government agencies IT-services should to the extent possible be 
build using open standards and use open source software and solutions to 
gradually liberate the agencies from reliance on individual platforms 
and solutions." (SOU 2009:86, page 163) [6].

The report also highlights work from other EU-member countries, in 
particular the Netherlands work on "Open Standards for ICT Procurement" [7].



Thank you for pushing this topic and working hard to find a solution fit 
for collaboration and sharing of information and knowledge in this day 
and age.

Kind regards
- Robin Eklind

[1]: 
http://www.riksdagen.se/sv/Dokument-Lagar/Forslag/Motioner/mot-2015162056-ppen-kallkod_H3022056/
[2]: http://data.riksdagen.se/fil/BC38DEF7-C5D8-49FE-A294-81344FE0B691
[3]: http://www.sou.gov.se/
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statens_offentliga_utredningar
[5]: 
http://www.edelegationen.se/Publikationer/Betankanden/Tredje-generationens-e-forvaltning/
[6]: 
http://www.edelegationen.se/Documents/Remisser,%20bet%C3%A4nkanden%20mm/SOU_2009_86.pdf
[7]: 
https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/community/open_standards_ict/topic/netherlands-open-connection-action-plan-use-open-standards-and-open-source-software-