Bill Requiring US Agencies To Share Custom Source Code With Each Other Becomes Law 25
President Biden on Monday signed the SHARE IT Act (H.R. 9566) into law, mandating federal agencies share custom-developed code with each other to prevent duplicative software development contracts and reduce the $12 billion annual government software expenditure. The law requires agencies to publicly list metadata about custom code, establish sharing policies, and align development with best practices while exempting classified, national security, and privacy-sensitive code. FedScoop reports: Under the law, agency chief information officers are required to develop policies within 180 days of enactment that implement the act. Those policies need to ensure that custom-developed code aligns with best practices, establish a process for making the metadata for custom code publicly available, and outline a standardized reporting process. Per the new law, metadata includes information about whether custom code was developed under a contract or shared in a repository, the contract number, and a hyperlink to the repository where the code was shared. The legislation also has industry support. Stan Shepard, Atlassian's general counsel, said that the company shares "the belief that greater collaboration and sharing of custom code will promote openness, efficiency, and innovation across the federal enterprise."
Aww shucks (Score:3)
The NSA is exempted. What a shame.
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They probably aren't exempted, at least not entirely.
OK, but what about maintenance? (Score:2)
Suppose Agency A and Agency B share some code. Do they know about each other? Is one agency charged with maintaining the code, or would each agency establish a fork and maintain its own baseline going forward? Who sets priority for changes/bug fixes? What happens when each agency wants to take the software in a different direction? Also, what about porting? Software developed for deployment environment A won't necessarily port to environment B without some effort. (That's true even across Linux versi
Re: OK, but what about maintenance? (Score:2)
Add to it that code sharing would probably waste more money than save due to the time needed to understand and adapt the code.
Even if the code blocks do the same thing the naming could be different and the programming language could be different.
and now can 3rd party vendors bill an big fee for (Score:2)
and now can 3rd party vendors bill an big fee for license violations?
Saying that that code was only licensed for Agency A and now that Agency B is useing that will be an fine of $2000 per workstation
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...and now can 3rd party vendors bill an big fee for license violations?
My reading of the bill is that 3rd parties paid by the Federal government to write custom code for the government must allow for this type of sharing.
This is hugely GOOD (Score:2)
Back in the day I made a lot of money on the side because I'd write something for the agency I worked for, and then several others decided they'd rather get authorization to 'borrow' me, and pay me contractor rates to deploy and configure it for them than re-develop it in house.
We all were getting paid by the same taxpayer and that would have just been a ridiculous waste. Sure, I got paid more for extra installations, but somebody was going to get paid for that part regardless.
If they have efficient commun
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>"I'd write something for the agency I worked for, and then several others decided they'd rather get authorization to 'borrow' me, and pay me contractor rates to deploy and configure it for them than re-develop it in house."
This doesn't change that at all. You would be paid to, as you said, "deploy and configure it" again. That isn't the same as writing the code over again.
This is mostly just a means for agencies to discover that code is available for their use that they might not have known about, thr
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The second paragraph of my post was right there, just waiting for you to read it.
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Yeah, I re-read it all again and discovered you were actually kinda making the point I was referencing :)
Privacy Sensitive Code ? (Score:2)
If the source code to your service is somehow privacy sensitive, I think something somewhere has gone horribly wrong.
Re:Privacy Sensitive Code ? (Score:5, Interesting)
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If the source code to your service is somehow privacy sensitive, I think something somewhere has gone horribly wrong.
It's got my login and password in it, I'd hate for that to get out.
Re: Privacy Sensitive Code ? (Score:2)
You mean that it's got your backdoor. :P
Re: Privacy Sensitive Code ? (Score:2)
If it's an API or some other sort of interface to server code that could be abused, then yes, it's sensitive.
This was the problem when the extJS folks posted their 'interpretation of GPLv3' that said that by using it, we had to open up all of the code it interacted with, not just the javascript / client stuff. There was no way in hell NASA was going to let me distribute the stuff that interacted with our databases so people could look for flaws in it to exploit.
Also, code that runs satellites & spacecr
Re: Privacy Sensitive Code ? (Score:2)
yeah, if it's a service that's not firewalled off and accessible from the public internet, there's no way in hell it's getting wide distribution.
There were some ones that I wrote that were shared with other groups, and we had a DarkPAN setup for distributing, but most of the sites running it were fire walled off. (it was a federated search engine... there were some public interfaces, which then called mostly private APIs at multiple sites to gather metadata)
I actually had a lot of other stuff that I *tried
Write-Only (Score:2)
I've spent a significant portion of my career writing documentation for government software projects that will never be read. I've even pasted LIPSUM into official Department of Government documentation and nobody even noticed. Or cared.
Sounds like a good idea, but ultimately will burn tax dollars and probably do nothing.
Re: Write-Only (Score:2)
You know 'WORM'? Write once, read many?
My ATR referred to some of our work as WORN: Write once, read never.
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0xdadde?
Re: Yay, I get to waste time on this..... (Score:2)
I once talked to the guy who made code.nasa.gov... ... and told him that his site sucked, as every major NASA center had a list of open source software, and half of those lists were longer than the one that NASA was advertising.
Of course, I only found out about it because someone at NASA HQ loved it so much that they had him fork it into data.nasa.gov... and I had asked him how they populated it, and he said he did a web search for data at NASA. so it listed websites, not datasets... and was crap that anyo
How many bills (Score:2)