Meet the chap open-sourcing US govt code – Paul, an ex-Microsoft anti-piracy engineer

Starting with literally piles of crap (no, not the code)

Giving software away isn't easy for the government

Releasing software and hardware developed by the government is problematic, Berg said, because it's highly regulated. "It's regulated to protect taxpayer money, to protect it from people who would embezzle it, who would misappropriate it for their own benefit, and to ensure that it goes for purposes that are good for the taxpayer," he explained.

Berg said despite the good intentions of these rules, they're so complicated that people aren't sure what they can and cannot do. Even giving something away can be problematic, because it isn't necessarily clear whether doing so represents altruism, a bribe, or a form of competitive advantage.

"If you've ever watched The Wire, it's a great show by HBO about this problem," Berg explained. "Everyone in the show has the best intentions, and they make a pathological juggernaut which is the system, which eats everyone and destroys everything they work for."

(By "everyone," we assume he means the government employees and not, for example, Marlo Stanfield.)

Berg said he wants to define a program where everything is open source by default, unless there's a really good reason to the contrary.

There is a good reason to prefer open source to the alternative, at least in the context of government. "Software that is not freely available to the general public is EAR99 export-controlled, which means you need to ensure that you're not handing it over to, for example, an Iranian citizen," Berg explained.

Iran is one of the countries prohibited to receive goods under US export regulations, with some exceptions. To ensure compliance, government rules require detailed background checks, which cost money. Releasing software as an open-source project avoids such regulatory headaches.

Berg is focused on releasing software related to Department of Energy research. But because the DoE operates laboratories, it handles research for other agencies like the Department of Defense and the Environmental Protection Agency. So the software he'll be shepherding toward open-source release could end up being associated with a variety of agencies.

"I'm going to estimate that the DoE laboratory budget is $50 billion per year, most of which ends up with software components," Berg said. "So we have $50 billion going into software engineering annually that I want to release."

Berg has made one project available, a build system, under the release process he's been testing. It took five months of presenting other government officials with questions about export compliance, security, archiving, departmental sign-offs, and adherence to relevant licenses and contracts.

Now that that build-system code has been deployed to GitHub – with an Apache 2.0 license – he expects the pace will pick up. "We have a mountain of software coming behind it, so we should be able to rapidly throw things through the process," he said.

Much of software destined for release will interest only scientists, researchers, and students. Some of it will be useful for replicating specific experiments. Other applications will be flagship supported projects like MOOSE. And some of the code will just be something someone wrote, with no obvious use.

Berg expects some government-developed software will allow people to start businesses. He cited code developed by a chemical hygienist who works with INL, a database and web front-end designed to identify risks that might arise when storing, moving, or combining chemicals. It's esoteric, but it's a matter of considerable importance in a facility that deals with nuclear material.

The chemical hygienist, said Berg, may start a private sector consulting business related to chemical safety. Because he can't just leave the lab and take government-funded software with him, the code could be released, allowing others to build businesses around it, even if they might not have the same expertise or client contacts.

"We're there for the commercialization of technology and for some reason, in a lot of people's minds, commercialization means proprietary," said Berg.

Berg sees proprietary software becoming scarce outside of the consumer market. "Almost all operating systems out there are open source, almost all software out there is open source," he said.

"Even closed-source software is primarily open source under the covers. They're using open-source components to build it. Software really has become an open source business." ®