Q. How does the Open Source community benefit from this?

By enabling a contractual path to supporting FOSS projects/foundations with real funding, the DoD becomes a valid (authorized) player to support the community. Additionally, the memo enables (and encourages) DoD personnel to contribute to open source software as part of their job's responsibilities. This brings thousands of developers into the OSS community who otherwise may not have engaged/may not have been allowed to engage.

> (1) Government employees may contribute to existing OSS projects (including being the primary maintainer) as part of their official duties, so long as they consult with their supervisor first to ensure a common-sense approach for contributions that preserve Operations Security (OPSEC) and further the Government's interests.

Worst case? They don't. They adopt OSS where possible to cut costs, fluff resumes, reduce effort and it ends up in a private repo somewhere only a few people will ever see. Best case? They create a public fork that fixes bugs and makes it suitable for their use case. Source: anecdata from being in the kitchen while the sausage was made.

The same way Open Source benefits from the NSA's current and former contributions.

A: Like with most of these programs, a few large organizations like google and microsoft stand to make a lot more money, but the people at the heart of the problem (the actual maintainers) stand to lose.

AT the bare minimum, even doing it yourself, it costs more money to create a company and apply for 501C3 status than the paltry sums of money most projects receive in donations.

I completely agree that there's some overhead associated with my proposed route, and really only makes sense if your project is large enough such that this overhead is already being incurred. I believe there is still a large gap between projects supported by large tech companies and companies that fit this bill, and in that gap are projects that can benefit from this change.

There are also various c3 and c6 (and similar statuses outside the US) fiscal sponsors that may work for some projects that don't want to set up a whole organization.

By having yet another discussion about OSI's version of the term "Open Source", and in particular about whether restriction in military use is covered by the "Fourth Freedom" (or wherever they postulate absence of purpose restrictions).

NB there's no such thing as an "Open Source community", just individuals and orgs with different goals: some want to show off, some want additional maintainers if at all possible, some want to give away their complement, some want to establish an alternative to a competitor's product, some want to promote a language or format, some want xGPL for political reasons, yet others don't care at all

wrong answers only: https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=95644#c4