OSS projects typically seek financial gain in the form of improvements. Form 207). If the contractor was required to transfer copyright to the government for works produced under contract (e.g., because the FAR 52.227-17 or DFARS 252.227-7020 clauses apply to it), then the government can release the software as open source software, because the government owns the copyright. Vendor lock-in, aka lock-in, is the situation in which customers are dependent on a single supplier for some product (i.e., a good or service), or products, and cannot move to another vendor without substantial costs and/or inconvenience. What contract applies, what are its terms, and what decisions have been made? This control enhancement is based in the need for some way to update software to fix problems after they are discovered. OSS implementations can help create and keep open standards open. Q: How can I avoid failure to comply with an OSS license? (Note that such software would often be classifed.). Unfortunately, the government must pay for all development and maintenance costs of GOTS; since these can be substantial, GOTS runs the risk of becoming obsolete when the government cannot afford those costs. The following questions discuss some specific cases. U.S. law governing federal procurement U.S. Code Title 41, Section 103 defines commercial product as including a product, other than real property, that (A) is of a type customarily used by the general public or by nongovernmental entities for purposes other than governmental purposes; and (B) has been sold, leased, or licensed, or offered for sale, lease, or license, to the general public. The Department of Defense (DoD) Software Modernization Strategy was approved Feb. 1. Hipaa obligations Desk for a fully-integrated, ready-to-run, turnkey system Communications ( SATCOM ) at Grumman! For more information about other personnel issues, visit the myPers website files associated. A 2003 MITRE study, Use of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in the U.S. Department of Defense, identified many OSS programs that the DoD is already using that are licensed using the GPL. First, get approval to publicly release the software. OSS COTS is especially appropriate when there is an existing OSS COTS product that meets the need, or one can be developed and supported by a wide range of users/co-developers. Is it COTS? The DoDIN APL is managed by the Approved Products Certification Office (APCO). Survey with people who are authorized to work on that survey files have associated and. Similarly, delaying a components OSS release too long may doom it, if another OSS component is released first. SurveyMonkey is used by numerous federal agencies. Q: What are antonyms for open source software? According to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO): For more about trademarks, see the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) page Trademark basics. c. The requesting DoD or OSD Component must request a review of the survey via the Reporting Tools; Survey Application; Survey Application Purpose. A permissive license permits arbitrary use of the program, including making proprietary versions of it. Various organizations have been formed to reduce patent risks for OSS. This has never been true, and explaining this takes little time. Thus, to reduce the risk of executing malicious code, potential users should consider the reputation of the supplier and the experience of other users, prefer software with a large number of users, and ensure that they get the real software and not an imitator. Also, the sponsoring activity can be reported through DOD to OMB for failure to comply with the PRA. Note that most commercial software is not intended to be used where the impact of any error of any kind is extremely high (e.g., a large number of lives are likely to be immediately lost if even the slightest software error occurs). Obviously, contractors cannot release anything (including software) to the public if it is classified. The resulting joint work as a whole is protected by the copyrights of the non-government authors and may be released according to the terms of the original open-source license. For commercial software, such needed fixes could be provided by a software vendor as part of a warranty, or in the case of OSS, by the government (or its contractors). Are there guidance documents on OGOTS/GOSS? Since both terms are in use, the rest of this document will use the term OGOTS/GOSS. Q: Is open source software the same as open systems/open standards? The release may also be limited by patent and trademark law. The DoDIN APL is an acquisition decision support tool for DoD organizations interested in procuring equipment to add to the DISN to support their mission. 6 -- Uniformed Housing and Station Allowances think this may apply to your survey or.! "acquire commercial services, commercial products, or nondevelopmental items other than commercial products to meet the needs of the agency; require prime contractors and subcontractors at all levels under the agency contracts to incorporate commercial services, commercial products, or nondevelopmental items other than commercial products as components of items supplied to the agency; modify requirements in appropriate cases to ensure that the requirements can be met by commercial services or commercial products or, to the extent that commercial products suitable to meet the agencys needs are not available, nondevelopmental items other than commercial products in response to agency solicitations; state specifications in terms that enable and encourage bidders and offerors to supply commercial services or commercial products or, to the extent that commercial products suitable to meet the agencys needs are not available, nondevelopmental items other than commercial products in response to the agency solicitations; revise the agencys procurement policies, practices, and procedures not required by law to reduce any impediments in those policies, practices, and procedures to the acquisition of commercial products and commercial services; and, require training of appropriate personnel in the acquisition of commercial products and commercial services.". This is not uncommon. Since OSS licenses are quite generous, the only license-violating actions a developer is likely to try is to release software under a more stringent license and those will have little effect if they cannot be enforced in court. Q: Can government employees develop software as part of their official duties and release it under an open source license? In most cases, contributors to OSS projects intend for their contributions to be gratuitous, and provide them for all (not just for the Federal government), clearly distinguishing such OSS contributions from the voluntary services that the ADA was designed to prevent. (2) The Office of the Inspector General of the Department of Defense in fulfilling its statutory duties and functions. In some cases, the sources of information for OSS differ. OGOTS/GOSS software is often not OSS; software is only OSS if it meets the definition of OSS. Support for OSS is often sold separately for OSS; in such cases, you must comply with the support terms for those uses to receive support, but these are typically the same kinds of terms that apply to proprietary software (and they tend to be simpler in practice). Many projects, particularly the large number of projects managed by the Free Software Foundation (FSF), ask for an employers disclaimer from the contributors employer in a number of circumstances. Purpose . Q: What are synonyms for open source software? Another useful source is the list of licenses accepted by the Google code hosting service. Q: Is a lot of pre-existing open source software available? Widely-used programs include the Apache web server, Firefox web browser, Linux kernel, and many other programs. Peripherals Needed for Most Authorized Telework Capabilities Note that this also applies to proprietary software, which often have even stricter limits on if/how the software may be changed. Applications ) to create, disseminate, and inspections which are recorded and documented as supplier surveys of 1973 as. A PDF reader is required for viewing. DoD approved products Learn which Cisco products are on the DoD's Approved Product List (APL). Q: Is there a large risk that widely-used OSS unlawfully includes proprietary software (in violation of copyright)? Yes, in general. Computing Services services provide mature and standardized operations processes, centralized management, and partner-focused support for our mission partners' data. This memo is available at, The Open Technology Development Roadmap was released by the office of the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Advanced Systems and Concepts, on 7 Jun 2006. If such software includes third-party components that were not produced in performace of that contract, the contractor is generally responsible for acquiring those components with acceptable licenses that premit the government to use that software. This instruction estblishes policies, assign responsibilities, and provide procedures for information collections involving the use of surveys. The, Educate all software developers that they must comply with all valid licenses - including both proprietary. (Free in Free software refers to freedom, not price.) Indeed, vulnerability databases such as CVE make it clear that merely hiding source code does not counter attacks: Hiding source code does inhibit the ability of third parties to respond to vulnerabilities (because changing software is more difficult without the source code), but this is obviously not a security advantage. GOTS software should not be released when it implements a strategic innovation, i.e. There is a fee for registering a trademark. Estimating the Total Development Cost of a Linux Distribution estimates that the Fedora 9 Linux distribution, which contains over 5,000 software packages, represents about $10.8 billion of development effort in 2008 dollars. Even if source code is necessary (e.g., for source code analyzers), adequate source code can often be regenerated by disassemblers and decompilers sufficiently to search for vulnerabilities. This clause establishes that the choice of venue clause (category 4) is superseded by the Contract Disputes Act (category 2), and thus the conflict is typically moot. There is no DoD policy forbidding or limiting the use of software licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). These services must be genuinely generic in the sense that the applications that use them must not depend on the detailed design of the GPL software to work. No; this is a low-probability risk for widely-used OSS programs. Once the government has unlimited rights, it may release that software to the public under any terms it wishes - including by using the GPL. DFARS 252.227-7014 specifically defines commercial computer software in a way that includes nearly all OSS, and defines noncommercial computer software as software that does not qualify as commercial computer software. This legal analysis must determine if it is possible to meet the conditions of all relevant licenses simultaneously. Where possible, software developed partly by government funds should broken into a set of smaller components at the lowest practicable level so the rules can be applied separately to each one. These prevent the software component (often a software library) from becoming proprietary, yet permit it to be part of a larger proprietary program. This also means that these particular licenses are compatible. Open standards also make it easier for OSS developers to create their projects, because the standard itself helps developers know what to do. No. Releasing software as OSS does not mean that organizations will automatically arise to help develop/support it. Software might not infringe on a patent when it was released, yet the same software may later infringe on a patent if the patent was granted after the softwares release. Similarly, OSS (as well as proprietary software) may indeed have malicious code embedded in it. An alternative is to not include the OSS component in the deliverable, but simply depend on it, as long as that is acceptable to the government. In effect, the malicious developer could lose many or all rights over their license-violating result, even rights they would normally have had! This makes the expectations clear to all parties, which may be especially important as personnel change. The FAR and DFARS specifically permit different agreements to be struck, within certain boundaries, and other agencies have other supplements. Classified software should already be marked as such, of course. Where possible, it may be better to divide such components into smaller components in a way that avoids this issue. Typically enforcement actions are based on copyright violations, and only copyright holders can raise a copyright claim in U.S. court. ), (See also GPL FAQ, Question Can the US Government release a program under the GNU GPL?). Be sure to consider such costs over a period of time (typically the lifetime of the system including its upgrades), and use the same period when evaluating alternatives; otherwise, one-time costs (such as costs to transition from an existing proprietary system) can lead to erroneous conclusions. Even if OSS has no cost to download, there is still a cost for OSS due to installation, support, and so on (whether done in-house or through external organizations). The Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has said, in an advisory ruling, that the country of origin of software is the place where the software is converted into object code (Software comes from the place where its converted into object code, says CBP, FierceGovernmentIT), for purposes of granting waivers of certain Buy American restrictions in U.S. law or practice or products offered for sale to the U.S. Government.. No, DoD policy does not require you to have commercial support for OSS, but you must have some plan for support. In most cases, yes. Open source software that has at least one non-governmental use, and is licensed to the public, is commercial software. Nov. 1, 2021. . For example, the Government has public release rights when the software is developed by Government personnel, when the Government receives unlimited rights in software developed by a contractor at Government expense, or when pre-existing OSS is modified by or for the Government. 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