Since I am new to seeing a 'contract' instead of a simply copyright license, I'm not sure of the implications of such. What if any obligations do I incur because of this? What liability am I exposed to.

It's a bit wordy, so I'm just not sure how it stands relative to some thing like the WTFPL.

Looking for some clarification on those unknown implications. And looking for a simpler contract/license.

Your agreement suggests that you are requiring everyone to include the terms of the agreement with the software when they make copies. Since all works of the federal government are in the public domain, can't anyone in the United States just copy the software without needing permission from this agreement, or following the terms of the agreement?

If you haven't already done so, please contact the folks at code.gov. They can offer good guidance on what to do.

Why does this "agreement" discuss the contributor agreement and the redistribution and use of the software. It seems like most organizations treat thier contributor policies and agreements as separate from their licensing agreements to users.

Is it suggesting that the official policy of the DOD is now only to accept code contributions to using the Linux project's DCO. Is there a rule making or other official published policy from the DOD to that effect?

I'm confused about what this project is (after reading through things).

Edit: sorry that seems snarky, I'm actually quite interested (we're working on similar measures at our organization) but find a lot of this to be placeholder without a clearly communicated general intent. Like, a bullet-ed list of what the intended goal is.

Since your concept is to require anyone "using" the source code to agree to the contract (and submit to jurisdiction/venue of the United States, have you considered if this is an additional restriction prohibited under the terms of the GPL.

If it is, then you will not be able to use the GPL for any of the projects adopting this approach.

For published DOD code by Federal employees and commissioned by the DOD with copyrights included (i.e. the code is owned by the DOD and thus is under the same non-copyright restrictions as Federal-employee-produced code), use the CC0 license at the below:

https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc0/

The CC0 is a legal copyright license including the following clause:

2. Waiver. To the greatest extent permitted by, but not in contravention of, applicable law, Affirmer hereby overtly, fully, permanently, irrevocably and unconditionally waives, abandons, and surrenders all of Affirmer's Copyright and Related Rights and associated claims and causes of action, whether now known or unknown (including existing as well as future claims and causes of action), in the Work (i) in all territories worldwide, (ii) for the maximum duration provided by applicable law or treaty (including future time extensions), (iii) in any current or future medium and for any number of copies, and (iv) for any purpose whatsoever, including without limitation commercial, advertising or promotional purposes (the "Waiver"). Affirmer makes the Waiver for the benefit of each member of the public at large and to the detriment of Affirmer's heirs and successors, fully intending that such Waiver shall not be subject to revocation, rescission, cancellation, termination, or any other legal or equitable action to disrupt the quiet enjoyment of the Work by the public as contemplated by Affirmer's express Statement of Purpose.

Essentially the CC0 claims the work is in the Public Domain, which is legally-required of work produced by the Federal government. The CC0 further claims that, should the Public Domain release be illegal in the recipient's jurisdiction, then the waiver of copyrights is exercised to the maximum legal extent, and an unlimited and unrestricted license to use the work for any purpose is granted.

This license does not conflict with the Public Domain requirement because it fully and permanently waives any copyrights and related rights, of which the Public Domain requirement stipulates the Federal government has none. You are, in fact, allowed to waive any rights you may or may not have, QED.

Continue from #62.

Glad to see this starting! One issue to add to the list: there's a huge amount of law around technology transfer out of the government, with a big chunk of it being around Cooperative Research and Development Agreements. The standard is that the USG gets a world-wide non-exclusive license to any work product that results from a CRADA. I'm in Navy Medicine, and have several executed CRADAs. Here's the section of US Code: 15USC3710a. Will I be able to apply this license?

https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT
and https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-2-Clause being stable urls for reference

specifically: it seems that the license only really talks about the initial code release by government employees, and doesn't clearly layout what rights (and/or contractual agreements) are granted by contributions that aren't by government employees.

the current language doesn't read like a clear decision tree of whats going on.

the MIT and BSD2 licences are a bit more straigh forward in language, the only extra complexity lies in contributions / the initial project that are authored by government employees.

Also i'm unsure if the language of this contract had any editorial feedback from a lawyer with intellectual property experience. It punts handling contributions by 3rd parties to the developer certificate of origin, but does not itself talk about granting those rights forward

When you publish software and use marketing materials to describe that software you are creating a liability that others will use that software and it will not work as described. If the end user is harmed then it may create a legal liability on the publisher.

This is something you want to avoid.

Following are several things that a reasonable person may imply they are getting when they accept and use your code:

• Warranty of title
• Warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose
• Warranties of non infringement of patents
• Absence of defects
• Accuracy of information and absence of errors

This license needs to specifically disclaim all of these implied warranties.

I would offer a merge myself but since I don't control code.mil (though it is "representing me" as a member of the DoD community...), this repository, or the web presence you've opted to go out with:

• Please explain what each file is in the README. Initially seeing LICENSE.md and LICENSE-agreement.md is confusing. As is CONTRIBUTING.md which (from reading it) doesn't apply here (I believe). FAQ.md should probably be part of README.

• Refactor so that index.html and CNAME (if required) are not in master branch. If both of those files are actually necessary to redirect http://code.mil (since #6 remains open sadly) they should be moved to a branch or hosted in another fashion and not in the same repo and branch as the place where collaboration about licensing is expected.

For the sake of people visiting and you trying to get input, please take a pass at these things.

Please make sure that people can create Mercurial repositories as well as Git ones. I can elaborate on the reasons for it if you want.

make public domain great again ;-)

The goal of this license as it stands is:

• Allow the US Military to publish things
• Confirm that US copyright does not apply
• Denounce any foreign copyright if it exists
• Require positive identification of new contributions

There is already an existing license that achieves this, has been thoroughly reviewed, and enjoys widespread adoption. Namely, the CC0 license.

Additionally, the CC0 makes many disclaimers about the published material so as to limit liabilities that the publisher assumes by making publication. Specifically, this addresses issue #36.

Note: CC0 does NOT satisfy the current requirement of DOSA 1.0draft in using a Developer’s Certificate of Origin. No problem. Instead, this requirement should be discussed in CONTRIBUTORS.md.

Hi, sorry if I'm mistaken but in most countries one needs to be over the age of majority to complete a contract?

From USLegal:

With some exceptions, a contract made by a minor is voidable.

From Net Lawman UK:

Further, a contract with a minor is voidable. That means he or she is able to cancel any contract at any time before reaching the age of 18 and for a reasonable period after that time. There is no requirement for him or her to have a justifiable reason for this, it can be done on a whim or where it may be advantageous to the child to do so.

Would this mean that those not in the age of majority in their country, or those unable to sign a contract in their country or the United States, would be unable to legally contribute without their parent signing for them?

Thanks!

Maybe i should have put this under projects?

I'm new to all this coding. I started because I'm trying to develop a program that can track training events and the vast amounts of data that happen just in a single training event. Both active and reserve components consume resources, train personnel, absorb training land, etc... Those are the easy numbers to follow. More over, I wanted to create a database that can track evaluations, Objective T ratings, critical and leader tasks executed within CATS tasks, and other variables that I've drawn up but need to create.

https://github.com/deptofdefense/code.mil/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md inside https://github.com/deptofdefense/code.mil/blob/master/Proposal/LICENSE-agreement.md incorrect. Suggest change to https://github.com/deptofdefense/code.mil/blob/master/Proposal/CONTRIBUTING.md or, perhaps, a relative link?

https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/

This is a public domain license that might help for this.

https://github.com/deptofdefense/code.mil/tree/faq-who
https://github.com/deptofdefense/code.mil/tree/reinastaley-patch-1

Still using these?

I am a government employee. I write software. Everything I write is PUBLIC DOMAIN. I tried many many times to use a license (any license) and was told by the Army lawyers that by law it is PUBLIC DOMAIN and can not be put under any license. One example was during the APPS for ARMY contest. I was told that I had no choice. I could not license it in any way.

How is this proposal different? Is anybody reading this a lawyer? If so, can you provide us the documents that support what I have been told?

As a former employee of a rather large defense contractor, I'm aware that quite a lot of DoD's procurements are done through a commercial bidding process, and that much of the technology that DoD has rights to is created by non-DoD personnel and businesses rather than directly by DoD personnel.

What, if any, affect would this licensing effort have on those technologies? What affect might it have on future RFPs and contracts?

There was a hack we looked at a while back that could work: if DoD designated NASA as an agent for releasing government employee created works then NASA could release it under any open source license since NASA can create copyright

I'd like to get involved with this initiative. Just point to where you need me.

There has been a good discussion about our code.mil experiment. For those of you who are government and/or DoD employees, we'd like to host a Google Hangout call today at 3pm ET. Please send your government email to [email protected] mentioning your GitHub username & we'll send an invite to that address. We also plan to have a discussion open to the public in the future. I'll post details in a future post.

Any non-governmental email address that comes in will be added to the list for public discussion.

In your draft open source agreement, paragraph c basically says that others have validated the above paragraphs a & b, which is fine.. but it also says paragraph "c" which means those others have verified that they have verified. So I think that the reference to paragraph c was probably a hold over from an earlier version of this agreement where perhaps its text was in an earlier paragraph "d."

The section 6 header is hard to write, but maybe something like, Rights Covering this Agreement

And the current header could be its paragraph.

I think it currently looks like section 6 is more important than the rest because it is all header.

just a place to dump maybe helpful ref's:
https://www.cendi.gov/
https://www.dwheeler.com/

It would a good idea to try to get OSI approval for any license you put forwards; this will make your code truly Open Source, which many outside projects require before they'll accept any code. ARL has been trying to do so with its own license, but is awaiting more guidance from the folks at code.gov before continuing the push.

The FAQ says: "The legal framework that makes works created by U.S. Federal government employees ineligible for copyright protections (17 U.S.C. 105) was written long before the invention of software.". That isn't true. Section 105 was written and more importantly adopted into law several decades after the invention of software.

Section 105 was first adopted in 1976 along with the rest of the 1976 Copyright act. The HR report on section 105 states that Section 105 of the 1976 Act is similar to Section 108 of the former title of the US Code governing copyright. The 1976 Act was a significant overall and recodification of the statutory and case law governing copyright in the United States. Software/source code has existed at least since 1952 when Grace Hopper created the first compiler.

Further, in part because of doubts about to the extent that copyright protected software (many believed that copyright could not protect object code), the Copyright Office established the CONTU commission. The copyright act was amended in 1980 to make clear the role of copyright in protecting software. The purpose of the CONTU commission was to make adjusts to the copyright act to account for new technology. Interestingly it appears that the CONTU commision was established in 1974 two years before the adoption of the 1976 act. Although the report was not finished until 1978 making the 1980 amendments necessary to implement the Commission's recommendations.

Major congrats on this! I'm quite familiar with this problem, having worked on it from many angles before finally getting a consensus solution together at other agencies I've worked at. It's hella tricky. I can cross-link later if you'd like once I dig up the previous issues. I also think most of that would fit in #14 if possible, so I'll connect into pre-existing issues where possible.

Overall though, I'm a little confused, on two points.

1. For where and when (and really more accurately, from whom) there is no ability to copyright the information, and thus nothing to actually license out, why not simply make it clear the public domain takes effect, and leave it at that? Why even cover those materials in contract law?

2. When the DOD does have copyright, why roll you own instead of using a license already in circulation?

Not saying there isn't a good reason for either - there may be! If the problem was explained a little more fully, I think the detail level of feedback and potential pull requests would increase as well.

tldr version: the legal stuff is really complicated. See this dicussion for some of the legal issues involved. The license agreement you've put together does not address many of the issues.

ARL has been wrestling with the legal issues since October 2015. They are complex. You can read some of the issues here, and you can see the guidelines we've come up with for our own workforce here. Please read through our material completely.

I've also been given an email address to contact you through, I'll be writing to you directly so you can confirm I'm DoD, and so I can confirm who you are. Then we can have a more complete discussion.

Hi folks! Great stuff here:

Bit of background, I run a resource called TLDRLegal to help developers understand open source licenses and a company FOSSA to help organizations track what OSS/licenses they use and comply with obligations.

I'm very keen to see what the edge cases look like around this especially when combining licenses from third-party code and when bundled with bigger software -- to me the use case you're targeting is specialized enough to warrant a new license, and I'm really excited to see where this goes.

1. Seek OSI involvement -- we work with the OSI who actively fights against license proliferation. New licenses esp. that don't fit strict guidelines (the OSD) end up becoming more problematic for the community, due to the p2p nature of oss and oss licensing.

2. I would recommend getting in touch with a well-known open source attorney if you haven't already -- they know all the edges in and out and have great practical experience doing this; I'm more than happy to introduce and vouch for two amazing ones: Heather Meeker (author MPL) and Luis Villa (Fmr OSI board member, and wikimedia foundation) -- email me at [email protected]

3. Developers don't like reading new licenses, and a non-standard license can be intimidating at first; I would encourage creating a plain English summary to release with the license -- similar to what we'd have on TLDRLegal

Best of luck!

What is all this licensing, copyright and contractual nonsense? Isn't federal work supposed to be in the public domain? No other license need be attached or considered.

This is an interesting approach to the problem- I understand why you're trying to do this.

However, I'm the type of developer who is also a copyright geek. I'm afraid that most developers have a shallow understanding of copyright and the public domain, and most of them will look at this a see the evil government trying to lock up what should be public. The result may be poor license adherence. The licensing scheme may be too clever to do what it is trying to do.

A more effective approach in my opinion, would be to simply say that the original contribution by authors A, B, and C, as of tag X is in the public domain, and that to retain the open character of the software, it is the expectation of the authors that any contributions not covered by US Government employment are to licensed by the contributor under (included) XXXX standard license. Also that any use of this repo normally covered by copyright must either include the notice and license or remove contributions past tag X.

This way, new contributors don't have to understand the public domain. The can just see the License badge and carry on as if its the same thing they usually do.

I don't know or care about the limitations that you may have on licences since I am not from the US.

But I think the modern approach is to use MIT licences where ever possible on all github projects, then users can use the code fairly freely for commercial, experimental or educational use.
If you have a problem creating the MIT licences directly then perhaps hire a company who can, then contribute to the code, if your not allowed to contribute then you probably should try to change your laws.

Simple MIT licences will mean that any useful code can attract quality coders that are willing to contribute, I think Apache2 and BSD3 are pretty common. I get a bit sad with code that has patents or GPL licences, although ported some recently as I can't use it easily on anything commercial.

If you start making up new licenses it only become confusing and developers from the wider world will just pass on making contributions.

Even with a MIT license you will find many people don't even have the time to try or make use of your code let alone contribute, so to use more restrictive opensource ones or adding special conditions will just mean your less likely to get contributions.

For instance Facebook opensources code like 'React' that is very popular but they put additional clauses which mean a project they have that recently interested me, when I saw the clause I stopped looking at the code, if work requires me to use the library then I would, but would try to avoid making contributions.

To me a MIT license means that I can use the code pretty freely and so if it's any good and I can contribute something then it's worth my time.

Sorry if my comments are not relevant but trying to give perspective of opensource external possible user.

May I suggest you use an existing license with the minimal necessary modifications rather than re-inventing the wheel?

Depending on what other stakeholders and adopters you are trying to get on-board you may choose one of several existing licenses. Then make changes that are as compact as possible and offset them from the rest of the license to the extent possible. While I am not suggesting it is the best license for this purpose, consider how you might adopt the BSD license. Simpler is better if you want developers to be comfortable with it. For example:

To the extent this work is entitled to Copyright protection, this work is Copyright (c) YEAR, HOLDER. All rights reserved except as permitted below.

Regardless of whether and to what extent this work is entitled to Copyright protection, the contractual right to use this work to the extent permitted below is granted to all persons provided the described conditions are met. These rights are granted in consideration of the benefits to the author of membership in and contribution to the open source community, including such benefits as may arise from study and adoption of the author's contributions.

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:
* Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
* Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the
documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
* Neither the name of the nor the
names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products
derived from this software without specific prior written permission.

THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS "AS IS" AND
ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED
WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE
DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL BE LIABLE FOR ANY
DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES
(INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES;
LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND
ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT
(INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS
SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

A license similar to the WTFpl would satisfy the expectations that all code should have a license, while not putting any restrictions on the use of the code. It's essentially a disclaimer of copy rights, written in the form of a one-sentence license.

My proposal will collect crucial pictorial, cartographic and topological data during the early stages of disasters, natural or otherwise.

Among witnesses and first responders, smartphones abound. During disasters or emergency responses, information, specifically environmental, reigns king.

Say an earthquake brings a building down. First responders haven't a much data regarding the area around the building, how it fell, what pther structures' integrity has been compromised, etc.

What if the people already on scene had received a notification similar to an AMBER alert, were asked to download a free app, open said app, and hold up their phones.

Utilizing a mixture of sonar, GPS, geofencing, and computer vision the crowd could help paint a picture of the landscape, and the app also allows for further communication with the crowd, advising those in hazardous areas to relocate.

Im typing this from a phone after studying your newly published repo, please excuse the brevity. I will expound upon my idea later today.

• The MadArkitekt

Moral rights are rights of creators of copyrighted works generally recognized in civil law jurisdictions and, to a lesser extent, in some common law jurisdictions. They include the right of attribution, the right to have a work published anonymously or pseudonymously, and the right to the integrity of the work.

Moral rights can exist even if the work is in the public domain.

I don't know if they exist in this case or not.

But it probably works to address what interaction moral rights, if any, make to works created using this license agreement.

IANAL.

Debian Free Software Guidelines

• Free Redistribution
• Source Code
• Derived Works
• Integrity of The Author's Source Code
• No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups
• No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor
• Distribution of License
• License Must Not Be Specific to Debian
• License Must Not Contaminate Other Software

As far as I can tell, depending on the companion license used, these should all be satisfied.

Thought Experiments

The Desert Island test

Imagine a castaway on a desert island with a solar-powered computer. This would make it impossible to fulfill any requirement to make changes publicly available or to send patches to some particular place. This holds even if such requirements are only upon request, as the castaway might be able to receive messages but be unable to send them. To be free, software must be modifiable by this unfortunate castaway, who must also be able to legally share modifications with friends on the island.

This looks satsified. There is no requirement to submit contributions back to DoD and the restrictions on DoD accepting contributions in the Your Contributions section would not apply when sharing modifications with your friends on the island.

It may be that DoD intended to say "modify" as opposed to "contribute to" which would fail this test, as you may not have had a copy of git with you on the island, and this essentially would require the use of git commit messages in order to distribute patches.

The Dissident test

Consider a dissident in a totalitarian state who wishes to share a modified bit of software with fellow dissidents, but does not wish to reveal the identity of the modifier, or directly reveal the modifications themselves, or even possession of the program, to the government. Any requirement for sending source modifications to anyone other than the recipient of the modified binary---in fact any forced distribution at all, beyond giving source to those who receive a copy of the binary---would put the dissident in danger. For Debian to consider software free it must not require any such "excess" distribution.

There does not appear to be any requirement for excess distribution, nor restrictions on distribution of the source or compiled binaries.

The Tentacles of Evil test

Imagine that the author is hired by a large evil corporation and, now in their thrall, attempts to do the worst to the users of the program: to make their lives miserable, to make them stop using the program, to expose them to legal liability, to make the program non-free, to discover their secrets, etc. The same can happen to a corporation bought out by a larger corporation bent on destroying free software in order to maintain its monopoly and extend its evil empire. The license cannot allow even the author to take away the required freedoms!

There does not appear to be a mechanism by which the granted rights can be revoked. The entire agreement is ignorable anyway in the case that we're looking at a country that sees US DoD work as public domain. To be entirely honest, I feel this is a waste of time.

Edit: The agreement, on further reading, appears to attempt to solve a problem where some contributions may have copyright where contributed by those that are not US government employees. I still do not believe this is necessary however as individual commits could be marked as public domain with a BSD, MIT, GPL, etc. license applying to the whole project. If it was necessary that part of the project would be used where it could only be used if public domain then you could work out which bits that was, but a license that is well-known and can be followed whether or not copyright applies makes everyone's life easier. This would not prevent DoD using contributions either, as long as they also agree to follow the license. You establish a baseline set of rights for everybody in this way that is clear and transparent.

Following these tests, the license as it currently stands will pass, however...

I understand your lawyers may be suffering from not invented here syndrome, but when your code needs to interact with other code, there is a threshold you need to be under for the amount of work that is required for open source developers to check if your license is compatible with the other licenses compared to how much work it would be to just replace your project with something with a well known license.

The DoD is not a special snowflake. The license document should state something along the lines of "there is no copyright on this work, where copyright does apply because you're in a country where you can't have no copyright, use BSD-2-clause".

If you must continue with this addition to the already too complex pool of open source licenses, please consult the Debian Free Software Guidelines FAQ as this will give you an idea of whether or not people will be able to actually use your code integrated as part of a larger system that you are showing resistance to really integrating into, using GitHub only as a token gesture afaict.

Edit: Despite the fact that you would be using BSD, MIT, GPL, etc. along with this agreement, you are still creating new variants of licenses by including the agreement along with the license, BSD+DoD, MIT+DoD, etc. and so these are new licenses.

First, welcome to the open source community.

Now onto business. I'd like to urge the DoD team here to consider adopting a license similar to this BSD or D&R license.

I'd prefer something like "GPL or D&R", but it's definitely the "or D&R" part that's most important to me.

I look forward to seeing what comes of this endeavor! 🙈 🎉

If you've secured the ability to use the name "Department of Defense" then please announce how that was secured. I would then promptly request to be a member of this organization and start my own projects as I am a member of the DoD.

Otherwise you should have the upstream organization that owns this project be named "Defense Digital Service".

I recommend adding paragraph numbers to the draft open source agreement so that specific line items can be more precisely identified between others.

https://code.mil presents a certificate warning saying that it's not valid for the correct hostname, since GitHub Pages doesn't support HTTPS for custom domains.

Code.mil should terminate TLS separately, and either proxy from there to GitHub Pages (in the clear, but at least not part of user connections), or host the content yourselves. It's not like you're hosting an often-changing piece of content -- it's just a redirect instruction.

(You could probably set up a cloud.gov account pretty quickly if you wanted to, which supports automatic HTTPS for custom domains, but this isn't meant as a product pitch. HTTPS is just important.)

I would be great if your web site could be used with 100% free software. This means, for example, not mandating the use of proprietary javascript to create one's account.

The full GNU guidelines are here:

https://www.gnu.org/software/repo-criteria.en.html

In your FAQ you specifically call out 'Is the DoD trying to do something funny here'. Yet, in your README you make reference to the 'end of March' twice without explaining what the plan is for the solicitation.

So despite the 'is the DoD trying to do something funny' and the immediate 'no', you literally have a literal hidden agenda. Not likely nefarious, but it would be nice to see some more clear intent on timeline and expected results. You could even state that you've chosen that timeline arbitrarily as an incentive for people to participate, just an explanation would be meaningful.

So here are some of my questions I'd like to see addressed in the README:

• The results of this solicitation for feedback are intended to be briefed at what level (e.g. DDS internally, some IPT within the Pentagon, someone from OSD whos become interested in Open source?)
• Have you staffed this project with legal council? We can all look at the https://www.dds.mil/ site and see the team, but despite the titles do you have some lawyers working on this. One could surmise that @shawoods would be it, but it would be nice for that to be clear. You're going to see a lot of IANL in regards to a topic that very much needs to be discussed by a Lawyer.
• Have you attempted to broker connection to other efforts within the DoD, have you gotten a response. The most notable would be ARL Open Campus, specifically their draft document for releasing software in an unrestricted public fashion. This should be a Lawyer to Lawyer discussion, as it appears ARL has staffed their effort with council and has been working on this since 2015 (and likely earlier).
• Why do you specifically request sign off? This seems like an arbitrary barrier to entry that is unconventional to other projects. You could make a blanket statement about what it means to do a pull request, and what , but sign off seems confusing and not value added.

I did not create this i just copied and pasted it from the site here at : whitehouse.gov http://www.whitehouse.gov/copyright

Case Studies/Whitehouse.gov

http://wiki.creativecommons.org/images/1/1f/Us-whitehouse-logo.jpg
whitehouse.gov http://www.whitehouse.gov/copyright
.

Evaluation Information.pngReview
Page Importance:
Page Quality:
Discuss this evaluation
www.whitehouse.gov is the official website of United States’ President Barack Obama and his Administration.
Our commitment to openness means more than simply informing the American people how decisions are made. It means recognizing that government does not have all the answers, and that public officials need to draw on what citizens know. — President Barak Obama, 1/21/09, http://www.whitehouse.gov/ope/

Overview

The United States of America’s President Barack Obama was sworn in on the 20th of January 2009 after being elected on the 4th of November 2008 to be the 44th leader of the American people. During the period between election and inauguration, the President elect’s transitional website (www.change.gov) was licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Licence.[1] This meant that all content posted by the President elect, his team and any contributors was subject to this licence. During his inauguration, at 12:01pm on the 20th of January 2009, President Barack Obama launched the whitehouse.gov website, the official website of the Obama-Biden Administration also incorporating the same Creative Commons licence (see below).[2]

Visitors to whitehouse.gov can choose to view information from a variety of categories, these being:

“The Briefing Room” which includes the White House Blog, weekly addresses, slideshows, speeches and official statements from the Obama-Biden Administration;
“The Agenda” which lists the “Obama-Biden Administration’s positions on everything from healthcare and the economy to alternative energy and foreign policy”;
“The Administration”, which as the name suggests, provides information about the various key figures in the current Administration;
“About the White House” which provides a historical overview of the US Government; and
“Our Government” which discusses democracy in the form of the various branches of government.
Of the above, perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of the site is the White House blog. The White House blog discusses various events from spring gardening with the First Lady to live blogs of the Vice President’s meeting of the Middle Class Task Force for green jobs. The White House blog is the US Government’s tool to keeping the American people in-step with the most recent developments in politics, and is pitched on the site as offering exactly that - the “Latest News & Updates”.

After visiting the site, it is easy to observe that the US Government’s goal in maintaining whitehouse.gov is to appear connected with its people. This is apparent from the weekly addresses, slideshows and constant blogging, which aim to create a sense of unity and inclusion for the American community. In teaming with this theme, the Office of Public Liaisons which can be accessed from the website’s Administration tab, offers an opportunity for the American people to give the Obama-Biden Administration feedback and suggestions on running the country. The idea behind this is obvious – “to take the Administration out of Washington and into communities across America, stimulating honest dialogue and ensuring that America's citizens and their elected officials have a government that works effectively for them and with them.” This initiative works in accordance with the idea of using the Creative Commons licence, and building a democracy based on true public participation, and will be discussed in detail below.

Statistics

In March 2009, average weekly traffic rankings for whitehouse.gov were 3,080 people which had increased by an average of 2,729 people per week, for three months. From these users, 72.5% came from the United States of America.

Licence Usage

Pursuant to the United States of America Code, Title 17, s 105, “copyright protection…is not available for any work of the United States Government, but the United States Government is not precluded from receiving and holding copyrights transferred to it by assignment, bequest, or otherwise.” As a result, the information posted by any of the Obama-Biden Administration on the whitehouse.gov site is not capable of being protected by copyright law.

However, this rule does not apply to third party content posted to on whitehouse.gov. Therefore, to align with the open principles of the website, people posting material to the site are required to license that material under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licence. The White House copyright policy states that as a result “visitors to this website agree to grant a non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free license to the rest of the world for their submissions to whitehouse.gov.”[3] This licence enables visitors to the site to copy, distribute, display or perform any of the text or images contained in the site, as well as to make derivative works of these. The only condition to such use is that visitors must attribute the work remixed, copied, distributed, displayed or performed to the author but not in such a way as to imply that the author has endorsed the derivative work.

This licence is the widest Creative Commons licence available that doesn’t give away all rights of the author. There are no restrictions with respect to using any material in a commercial manner, neither are there any restrictions about share-alike conditions. The use of this licence reflects the prohibition that copyright protection (of any kind) is not afforded to the United States Government or its products. In the event that a more onerous Creative Commons licence was imposed on Third Party content, this may be argued as being out of line with this principle.

Motivations

Creative Commons licensing enables the Obama-Biden Administration to work collaboratively with the American people, and demonstrates a genuine focus on democratic participation in the running of the country. The ability to take information from the site with only an obligation to attribute it to the author means that visitors to the site can be fully informed and in turn can fully inform others. Additionally, this process means that the circulation of inaccurate material is kept to a minimum because of the openness of the collaboration process.

Furthermore, after receiving a great response from using a Creative Commons licence on his change.gov site (even though the content contained was copyrightable at the time given that it was not US governmental material yet), President Obama’s choice to continue with the Creative Commons license for whitehouse.gov was strategically logical. Choosing to use the Creative Commons licence clearly influenced and reached out to those sectors of the community who were in tune with current creative technological advancements, and whose attention may not have been attracted otherwise. Creative Commons blogger, Fred Benenson encouraged the use of Creative Commons by President Obama, as did others with comments like “Thank you again, Mr President,” and “How awesome” posted on blogs all over the internet. The clearly favourable responses from the American people to the use of a Creative Commons licence on whitehouse.gov, indicates that the President’s team was successful in utilizing the licence to create a truly democratic process in a creative online environment. The political results of this move are a clear motivation for the use of the Creative Commons licence.

Finally, the convenience of the archiving process of the website has been made abundantly simpler given the use of the Creative Commons Licence. As one blogger put it, using a CC licence for 3rd party material on whitehouse.gov “would make the archiving of the website a much easier proposition.” Obviously the ability to forego any copyright processes and other such records would be a motivation for the maintainers of whitehouse.gov given that the site will encourage high traffic and be in use for the entire term of President Obama.

It can be gathered from comments by the administration on the site, and in particular those on the site of the Office of Public Liaison, that the current US Government is legitimately interested in generating public interest around policy issues in order to build a greater democracy.

Technical Details

Whitehouse.gov has implemented the license image and linked to the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States deed. The license can be found on the Copyright Policy page:

Whitehouse1.png

Whitehouse.gov has not implemented any of the CC REL license metadata specification. The code below generates the license mark above:

Except where otherwise noted, third-party content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Visitors to this website agree to grant a non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free license to the rest of the world for their submissions to Whitehouse.gov under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

References

Jump up ↑ The Office of the President Elect, Copyright Notice (2008) at 19 March 2009.
Jump up ↑ Benenson, F Whitehouse.gov’s 3rd Party Content Under CC-BY (2009) Creative Commons, at 20 March 2009.
Jump up ↑ The White House, Copyright Notice (2009) at 20 March 2009.
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