You’re right that in a perfect world, everyone’s effort would be perfectly coordinated. But by having a Big Daddy organization guiding and standardizing, I think we would lose a lot of the potential ingenuity in the gov’t development community. We don’t have that in the commercial world, and things tend to work out OK over the long term. Instead, I’d like to see thousands of tiny shops, all building sustainable businesses around supporting open source projects. The results would be the same, but we wouldn’t have to sacrifice any autonomy or innovation.

Should we consider the value of just getting the code out there? Similar to open data, perhaps our initial goal is to get the code out of personal computers onto a single platform. It’s a public asset and should be put in the public domain. Re-use/sharing can only occur once this is achieved.