The White House released a draft policy yesterday for sharing source code among federal agencies, including a pilot program that will make portions of federal code open source.

This policy will require new software developed specifically for or by the Federal Government to be made available for sharing and re-use across Federal agencies. It also includes a pilot program that will result in a portion of that new federally-funded custom code being released to the public.

The policy outlined here highlights a draft policy proposal of a pilot program requiring covered agencies to release at least 20 percent of their newly-developed custom code, in addition to the release of all custom code developed by Federal employees at covered agencies as part of their official duties, subject to certain exceptions as noted in the main body of the policy.

Many Federal GIS consultants just had a bad morning.