Sharing Principles, Policies, and Law, Not Just Code

With good reason, government staff require proven, reliable, and safe information technology solutions for their needs. Further, with government IT staff and budgets being cut, government needs to do more with less. Making apps already developed and proven by one government entity (such as a city government) available as open source, can be a great starting point for engaging with other government entities to reuse applications. Further, some of the fears of working with open source projects (such as lack of supporting technical community) can be alleviated by leveraging an application’s community resources such as discussion email lists.

However, support and viability of an application are only a few of the considerations government IT staff must consider. Sometimes procurement issues, restrictive licensing terms, and fears of intellectual property (IP) infringement also weigh heavy in the ultimate decision to proceed with implementing an open source software solution.

At its core, the open source software strategy revolves around “harnessing the power of distributed peer review and transparency of process,” as set forth by the Open Source Initiative. It follows then that the licences, and policy guidance used to support open source software should also harness the power of community and the transparency of process.