What Does Open Source Software Mean to US Government?

The US Government has shown its love for Open Source Software. On March 10 the White House published a blog post that declared a new campaign designed to increase the use of open source by the government. It also drafted a policy document on source code, which is open for comment on GitHub. According to the government, the new drive toward open source reflects an effort to save money, avoid failures and help easier collaboration. “We can save taxpayer dollars by avoiding duplicative custom software purchases and promote innovation and collaboration across Federal agencies,” the blog post said.

For supporters, the government’s promise to become more friendly toward the idea of open source is no doubt a foot in the right direction. The only problem is, the way the government is defining Open Source and how they are setting it in their terms. The blog post simply mentioned  sharing source code between federal agencies, and releasing a fragment of the code to the public. Also the only open source projects that the blog post mentions are ones that center around open data more than open code. It revolves around information and databases of it, not codes. The use of open source coding to generate the web interface is not to be confused and related to what open source coding really stands for.

In that respect, the government seems to be confusing open data with open source code which is a very different thing from developing and sharing source code publicly. More engagement by the federal government with open source is not a bad thing, even if the government doesn’t get it totally right. Yet by failing both to define open source and to appreciate the significant difference between open source code and open datasets, the government is altering to its own satisfaction, the meaning of Open Source itself. Considering data and information available as open source without considering the source code that is used for everything to be built upon and is the actual underlying structure that runs these data warehouses and reserves, the value of open source starts dropping to a point where it becomes insignificant.