Contractors have their own hassles when it comes to open source. Pre-openstack, there was a small contracting company called Anso Labs that consisted of a few of us that were creating a private cloud for NASA. After a few months of banging our head against Eucalyptus (java based open-core private cloud software), we decided to write our own version over a weekend and call it Nova. We convinced the civil-servants in charge to allow us to use our new thing, which we continued to improve at NASA. This project eventually became the compute platform for openstack.
There were multiple weeks of meetings with lawyers (including discussions of whether we needed a space act agreement[1]) to figure out how to actually open source the modifications we made on NASA's behalf. Ultimately we ended up having to assign all of the nova copyrights to the government[2] so that they could open source the modifications. I didn't even think that the government could own copyright but apparently it can[3].
There were multiple weeks of meetings with lawyers (including discussions of whether we needed a space act agreement[1]) to figure out how to actually open source the modifications we made on NASA's behalf. Ultimately we ended up having to assign all of the nova copyrights to the government[2] so that they could open source the modifications. I didn't even think that the government could own copyright but apparently it can[3].
[1]: https://www.nasa.gov/partnerships/about.html [2]: https://github.com/openstack/nova/commit/c88d1f033bd600e855c... [3]: https://www.usa.gov/government-works/