The White House has released a policy that aims to facilitate exchange and reuse of custom-built source code across federal agencies.
Federal Chief Information Officer Tony Scott wrote in a blog post published Monday the Federal Source Code Policy was introduced in order to reduce the acquisition of duplicative software code and promote collaboration among government agencies.
The policy also intends to launch a pilot program that would require agencies to release over 20 percent of custom-developed source code as open source software for a three-year period and gather additional information on custom software for use in the evaluation of the pilot’s performance.
Scott, an inductee into Executive Mosaic’s Wash100 for 2016, also cited open source code-based platforms launched by federal agencies such as the White House’s petition platform We the People and General Service Administration’s Data.gov.
The White House will unveil the Code.gov website in the next few months in an effort to leverage the federal government’s open source software, he added.
