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There are a few steps you will need to take to open source any project. Some of these steps are more administrative, and some involve adding things to your codebase. If you’re not sure if you can open source your project, checkout our getting started workflow.
This is one suggested workflow for open sourcing an existing project (whether there is code or not yet), but you may want - or need - to follow a different process. Be sure to check with your organization to see if there is already a defined path to open source for you! If you aren't sure, send us an email!
You will need to get approval from various people – exactly who isn’t up to us! In general this will probably be your security manager and program manager, but it may include other folks as well, depending on the project type. If you aren’t sure, feel free to shoot us an email and we can look into it!
This gets a little complicated because of how U.S. law treats creative works by U.S. federal government employees.
You may not be aware, but most code produced by a U.S. federal employee within the scope of their employment does not have copyright protections in the U.S. and certain foreign jurisdictions. In the U.S., creative works (like code) without copyright protections are sometimes referred to as “public domain.” Not all countries recognize the concept of public domain, and many countries actually recognize copyright protections for code written by U.S. federal employees.
Even if the code was completely written by U.S. federal employees, it is still good practice to attach a license to the project so that the applicable license terms are clear: 1) in countries where U.S. federal employees have recognized copyright and 2) for contributions from public contributors. The Code.mil team recommends attaching an open source license along with an “intent” document that clearly indicates how the government intends the code to be released, even if in the United States public domain applies.
You can use this site to explore (and choose) an open source license. The Code.mil team recommends using a permissive license unless someone very familiar with copyleft licenses and how they operate both legally and technically is directly involved with the project. Our suggestions for permissive licenses are MIT, ISC, or BSD-3 unless patents are potentially involved in which case we suggest Apache 2.0 although the others work too. Do not misunderstand these suggestions – many of us on the Code.mil believe in the free software movement and GPL based licenses, but projects managed by the Federal government are not always the best candidates for copyleft licenses.
Now that you’ve chosen a license you should add a few documents to the codebase to identify the project and provide the guidance mentioned above in Step 2. The first document is your license itself, typically this will be named “LICENSE” (or maybe “LICENSE.md”). You should accompany this with a document outlining your intent for the use of this code. We suggest adding a document called “INTENT.md” to the code.
You can see examples of these documents in the code repository for this very website!
You might notice in the LICENSE.md file that there is a copyright line. That one is key, and you should keep it, even if you switch to a different license. Note that if this project was developed with a contractor that the contractor company name should also be listed here. Here is an example:
"Copyright (c) 2017-2018 U.S. Federal Government (in countries where recognized)
Copyright (c) 2018 ABC Company, Inc."
The last piece of documentation you absolutely need is how people can contribute to your project, and what they must do. The Code.mil team has taken the approach of using a Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO) process, but a slightly lighter version. Essentially, contributors agree that their submission is their own original work and release any expectation of compensation, etc. The difference between a traditional DCO process and this slightly lighter version is that with the lighter version the DCO “sign off” is only made one time for the entire project in CONTRIBUTORS.md as opposed to the traditional DCO process, which requires a sign off for every commit.
You can read the contributing documentation for this site to see an example of what this looks like:
Now that you have all the pieces in place, it’s time to release the code publicly! There are lots of ways to do this, but essentially you are posting the source code (and documentation) online for all to see. Sites like GitHub, BitBucket, and GitLab provide an easy way for the public to track your progress and submit contributions. That said, if you aren’t using Git as your source control tool you can put the code up in any manner you wish, so long as changes can be tracked.
If you aren’t sure where to post the code, or you need help getting source control set up, contact us and we can advise you!
If you plan to use GitHub then we encourage you to add the code-mil topic to your repository. This will allow for easy discoverability by other developers within and outside of the government.
The last piece of this process is adding your project to the code inventory file that the DoD uses to comply with OMB Policy (M-16-21). You can read more about the format of the code inventory format on the Code.gov website.
To add your project you will need to submit a Pull Request to the Code.mil project on GitHub. There are instructions for doing so in our code repository, but if you are not familiar with GitHub, you can also just tell us about your project and we can get the process started.