Loosen this to any software developed by private companies on government contract. I believe that the IP developed this way already has a “unlimited government use” license.

Unless its mandate were carefully constrained by statute, such a clearinghouse could easily grow into a ”public works” program for the digital age, with pressure rising for government to fund software development for as a “public good.”

This happened in the 1960s and 1970s (and continued in a more restrained fashion after that). One of the resulting developments is much of the Internet and the software that continues to be its foundation even today. Indeed, a lot of people feel that DARPA became too conservative in its funding choices after that, partly out of the very fear you express — not wanting to develop software in possible competition with private industry.

It might actually be a pretty good thing if government did fund software development as a public good — there are a lot of developments (e.g., email) that were just spin-offs, midnight hacks that emerged from other projects. Attempts to monetize it would have simply strangled it.

Another good example is in the enabling technologies like the GNU compilers and scripting languages like Perl, Python, and Ruby. The cost of developing them has been more than recovered by society as a whole in the increased productivity that they enabled, but putting a price on them would have strangled a lot of that productivity.

Loosen this to any software developed by private companies on government contract. I believe that the IP developed this way already has a “unlimited government use” license.

Unless its mandate were carefully constrained by statute, such a clearinghouse could easily grow into a ”public works” program for the digital age, with pressure rising for government to fund software development for as a “public good.”

This happened in the 1960s and 1970s (and continued in a more restrained fashion after that). One of the resulting developments is much of the Internet and the software that continues to be its foundation even today. Indeed, a lot of people feel that DARPA became too conservative in its funding choices after that, partly out of the very fear you express — not wanting to develop software in possible competition with private industry.

It might actually be a pretty good thing if government did fund software development as a public good — there are a lot of developments (e.g., email) that were just spin-offs, midnight hacks that emerged from other projects. Attempts to monetize it would have simply strangled it.

Another good example is in the enabling technologies like the GNU compilers and scripting languages like Perl, Python, and Ruby. The cost of developing them has been more than recovered by society as a whole in the increased productivity that they enabled, but putting a price on them would have strangled a lot of that productivity.

But if a private company wants to incorporate a government-developed app into proprietary software, they should be free to do so.

I think the LGPL would be the best compromise here. The LGPL would allow them to link it into a bigger app without open sourcing their main product, but require that any changes they make to the open source code get released to the public.