The United States Department of War (DoW) Open Source Software FAQ is an educational resource for government employees and government contractors, covering the policies and legal issues that govern the use of open source software (OSS) in the Department.
faq.md is the source of truth. It is the whole document.
The information in this FAQ does not constitute legal advice. Legal questions relating to specific situations should be referred to legal counsel. References to specific products or organizations are for information only and do not constitute an endorsement of the product or company.
| Path | What it is |
|---|---|
faq.md |
The FAQ itself. |
images/ |
Figures referenced by the FAQ. |
references/ |
Local archival copies of cited source documents. |
TODO.md |
Open editorial and policy-currency work. |
references/ exists because several cited documents live on hosts that have
proven unreliable — one is already cited via the Internet Archive, and others
sit behind CAC/PKI walls or CMS platforms that return soft 404s. The local
copies are a hedge against that link rot, not duplicates of live links.
This FAQ originated on the DoD CIO website and was published to GitHub in 2013 as an experiment in using collaborative tools for public engagement on government policy documents. That experiment worked, and the document is now moving to the Code.mil organization to be published as part of code.mil.
This repository is a fresh start. The previous repository kept its content on a
gh-pages branch so that GitHub Pages would render it, and tracked the
generated HTML alongside the source. Neither is needed once code.mil handles
publishing, so this repository carries the content only: the Markdown, the
figures, and the archived references. The prior repository remains available at
risacher/DoD-OSS-FAQ for anyone who
needs the earlier revision history.
Suggestions for changes or additions — from military and civilian personnel,
contractors, and private citizens alike — are welcome as issues or pull
requests against faq.md.
Please submit prose in Markdown rather than as a word processor document.
Note that LICENSE sets out the terms under which contributions are
licensed to the U.S. Government; opening a pull request accepts those terms.