FW: [Ossi] DISA to open source administrative software

[james cook]

While interesting I am curious to relevancy of what the US congress
did not do, and did not change to any discussion. That was a whole lot
of verbiage for 'look ma, nothing new here'.

On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 3:11 PM, wtfpl user <wtfpl.user at googlemail.com> wrote:
> 2009/3/17 David Woolley <forums at david-woolley.me.uk>:
>> wtfpl user wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> Note, too, that any enhancements to Free/Open Source Software (FOSS)
>>> by DISA employees (but not DISA contractors) would be in the public
>>> domain because of 17 USC 105.  So it can be used by anybody without
>>> regard to the OSL/AFL (any version) because it is in the public
>>> domain.
>>
>> Whilst the enhancements may be in the public domain, they are of little use
>> without the code they enhance, which would still be under the original
>> copyrights.
>
> To repeat:
>
> In the 108th Congress, there was an effort (H.R. 2613) to extend that
> to works produced under government contracts. "Copyright protection
> under this title is not available for any work produced pursuant to
> scientific research substantially funded by the Federal Government
> ..." The idea behind the legislation was to make medical research
> reports more generally available.
>
> It is interesting to ponder what that might do to FOSS written in
> universities under federal grants and contracts.  But to the best of
> my knowledge, there was no recognition of that problem by any of the
> FOSS people.
>