The White House has released a policy that promotes reuse of source code developed by agencies across the federal government.

The new Federal Source Code Policy also sets up a pilot program “that requires agencies, when commissioning new custom software, to release at least 20 percent of new custom-developed code as open source software (OSS) for three years,” Tony Scott, U.S. CIO and Anne E. Rung, chief acquisition officer, wrote in a memorandum to heads of departments and agencies on Monday.

The federal government spends every year over $6 billion on software through more than 42,000 transactions, but agencies that procure custom-developed source code do not necessarily make their new code broadly available for reuse by the federal government.

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