One thing that I really dislike is when gov't (i.e. the taxpayer) funds developers to write software for the Common Good (e.g. contact tracing apps) but they keep it proprietary, giving them a proprietorial advantage, allowing them to exploit the very same people who paid for its development. That's classic "privatise profit, socialise cost"... Not on.
@lightweight In the US, Section 105 of the Copyright Act says that all work created by the federal government has no copyright protection and is part of the public domain. This includes software.
This post suggests that best practices are converging on releasing code created by the US government under CC-0
https://ben.balter.com/2014/10/08/open-source-licensing-for-government-attorneys/
@mpanhans yes, Matt! Has the USGovt' shifted to CC0 from public domain? My first 5 years of commercial scientific research work were based on work published by the USGS under public domain... it's the right approach. My understanding is CC0 is an attempt to create something equivalent to the US-specific "public domain" in other countries where it has no legal standing. Here in NZ, sometimes gov't funded work is released under "Crown Copyright" (a Commonwealth thing) which != public domain.
@lightweight Interesting! Well I don't know that there has been any government-wide official policy, but I just have seen several projects at US govt agencies using CC-0. So it looks to me like things are moving that way.
