#Federal Source Code Policy and the USGS The new Federal Source Code Policy has been released officially as OMB M-16-21. It is now official Administration policy for all Executive Branch Agencies. The soon to be announced USGS Software Release Policy will come out as an Instructional Memorandum, and it has our own policies that backup the Federal Source Code Policy in the context of USGS Fundamental Science Practices.
One of the things that M-16-21 will be implementing is a government-wide inventory of software code. Similar to what happened with M-13-13, the open data policy, we will be asked to provide a listing of all the software we have in the open and what we have not open, including needing to provide a justification for close source codes.
There is an interesting discussion happening on the topic of how to do the inventory.