I feel like academia is usually behind free and open source software with these kinds of things, but in this case, it might be ahead.
The United States’ National Institutes of Health (NIH) mandates that any NIH-funded research be available via PubMed Central, a cost-free research repository.
Of course, the challenge is enforcing the mandate. But it’s a good first step for research. And eventually, I hope, for software.
If Software Is Funded from a Public Source, Its Code Should Be Open Source | Linux Journal
While I agree that most govt funded software should be F/LOSS, there are definitely some software produced for the govt which should never be widely released. But that software should be made available to any future winner of the contract under which it was created.
I worked on multiple USgovt contracts. For most of them, I wouldn’t want the code shared. Do you really want foreign states like Iran having access to guidance and terminal guidance code? Hint: NO! There are ITAR regulations which govern this type of code which must be followed.
But some projects I worked were released to the public, though they were built using expensive commercial tools, so those releases weren’t exactly useful to 1-man dev companies. At the time, F/LOSS wasn’t as capable as it is today. Qt and GTK didn’t exist. Our project code was taken by a few of the contract members and turned into commercial use – it wasn’t AGPL’d. Aircraft maintenance documentation is provided to the aircraft techs using a distant relative of that code and Adobe PDF documents have search capabilities based on some of the work in that contract. PDF files didn’t support search until the mid-1990s. Type-3 fonts and scanned images still cause issues with PDF search today.
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