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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> Sadly it doesn't sound like the law requires agencies to make the code publicly open source, it just requires inter-agency sharing

This is a good first step. The next would be sharing with states, municipalities and universities. Public sharing disperses a lot of IT responsibility that presently doesn’t exist.

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And they will eventually learn that it's easier to share with the public at large than with a neighboring department.

At least that's my experience in a commercial setting: it's easier to publish something without restriction than to share it with a specific hardware or software partner only. The latter creates all kinds of questions around neutrality, applicability of NDAs, licensing, and so on.

Yes it is better than NOT sharing!

What would be more interesting is to require all private companies who are doing US government contracts, especially the ones who are handling classified projects to do the same as these US agencies!!!

Gov-acquired software can be architected to separate open-source components from classified components. This enables reuse of commercial (open or closed) software with the economics and rapid iteration of larger markets. For open-source components, this enables public collaboration on COTS, with non-public collaboration on classified GO(v)TS components.

Who is going to pay for this?

It's practical for software vendors on platforms [1] with virtualization, which have been gradually increasing over the past decade, including Windows, ChromeOS and Android.

[1] https://www.intel.com/content/dam/doc/case-study/enterprise-...

I'm a little lost, but it seems like you aren't - how does virtualization help with the actual work of splitting codebases into reusable components?

It doesn't help with doing any splitting (e.g. 20 years ago) but in current era where software is architected as micro-services and packaged for containers and VMs, software is more likely to be "born as reusable component".

Pretty sure this is how BRL-CAD works, most of the software is open source, but there are a few classified extensions not released.

Thanks for the pointer, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BRL-CAD

> The BRL-CAD source code repository is the oldest known public version-controlled codebase in the world that's still under active development, dating back to 1983-12-16 00:10:31 UTC.

This is beautiful, do you think we might be going in such a direction?

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