Public Resource wants to open source America's operating system

Cory Doctorow 2:09 pm Wed Sep 17, 2008

Carl sez,

In a classic shell game of shuffle that tax dollar, public.resource.org (with contributions from our friends at Sunlight Foundation, Omidyar Network, GovTrack.us, Stanford, and Google) just sent a check for $17,325 to the Government Printing Office.

That money purchases a bulk feed of the Code of Federal Regulations in the raw SGML format, which we will promptly open source. We've proposed that this exercise is kind of silly and that GPO should simply open source the rest of their bulk products since they are required to make them available anyway (and already paid to do so) and their incremental costs of distribution on the net would be $0.

For those of you in the private sector who are confused on how this all government/nonprofit stuff works, we've diagrammed the business model.

To the Public Printer of the United States in re: America's Operating System

(Thanks, Carl!)

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