An official website of the United States government
Open source software (OSS) is ubiquitous, serving as specialized applications nurtured by devoted user communities, and as digital infrastructure underlying platforms used by millions of people. OSS is developed, maintained, and extended through the contribution of independent developers as well as people from businesses, universities, government research institutions, and nonprofits. Despite its prevalence, the scope and impact of OSS are not currently well-measured. Recent policies of the U.S. Federal Government promote sharing of software code developed by or for the Federal Government. While the policy to promote reusing and sharing of software created with public funding is relatively new, public funding plays an important and not fully accounted role in the creation of OSS. This paper aims to measure the scope and value of OSS development in the U.S. Federal Government. We collect data from Code.gov, the government’s platform for sharing OSS projects, and study contributions of agencies. The dataset contains 17K repositories from 21 agencies, with the majority of contributions originating from the DOE, NASA and GSA. In addition, we collect data on development activity (e.g., lines of code, contributors) of the repositories on GitHub, the largest hosting facility worldwide. Adopting a cost estimation model from software engineering, we generate estimates of investment in OSS that are consistent with the U.S. national accounting methods used for measuring software investment. Finally, we generate and analyze collaboration network resulting from cross-agency contributions to repositories and explore the centrality of agencies in the network.
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Measuring Public Open-Source Software in the Federal Government: An Analysis of Code.gov
This paper presents an in-depth analysis of patterns and trends in the open-source software (OSS) contributions by the U.S. federal government agencies. OSS is a unique category of computer software notable for its publicly accessible source code and the rights it provides for modification and distribution for any purpose. Prompted by the Federal Source Code Policy (USCIO, 2016), Code.gov was established as a platform to facilitate the sharing of custom-developed software across various federal government agencies. This study leverages data from Code.gov, which catalogs OSS projects developed and shared by government agencies, and enhances this data with detailed development and contributor information from GitHub. By adopting a cost estimation methodology that is consistent with the U.S. national accounting framework for software investment proposed in Korkmaz et al. (2024), this research provides annual estimates of investment in OSS by government agencies for the 2009–2021 period. The findings indicate a significant investment by the federal government in OSS, with the 2021 investment estimated at around $407 million. This study not only sheds light on the government’s role in fostering OSS development but also offers a valuable framework for assessing the scope and value of OSS initiatives within the public sector.
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- PAR ID:
- 10528099
- Publisher / Repository:
- The School of Statistics and the Center for Applied Statistics, Renmin University of China
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Data Science
- ISSN:
- 1680-743X
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 20
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.6339/24-JDS1148
