Uncle Sam launches open source trove of government code

The United States government has made good on its policy of requiring agencies to release 20 per cent of their bespoke code as open source by making code.gov live, complete with lots of code.

Code.gov is a rather bare bones affair, with a listing of available projects its richest page as it offers code from 13 agencies. Among the projects on offer are a NASA Trick simulation environment and the analytics code powering analytics.usa.gov that The Register finds useful when assessing desktop OS market share.

There's also a GitHub repository to consider.

United States CIO Tony Scott said he hopes the launch gives developers within and without government some useful code. The Office of Personnel Management's Google-analytics-data-cruncher certainly looks to have wide applicability, as does The White House's petition-organising repo.

The United States is not alone in such efforts: around the world governments encourage the use of commissioned code for re-use in either in-house app stores or public repositories. The likes of the UK's Government Digital Service and Australia's Digital Transformation Office champion such efforts, with mixed success. ®