Ghidra: License: Was this made by the United States Government?

[Myriachan]

Was Ghidra made by the United States Government, as defined by 17 USC 105? If so, the LICENSE file doesn't really make sense.

[RobRoseKnows]

See intent.md: https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra/blob/master/INTENT.md

[ctubbsii]

Hi @Myriachan,

Thanks for the great question, and to @RobRoseKnows for beating me to the answer.

If interested, there's also some helpful information at https://government.github.io/best-practices/copyright/

[impredicative]

The fact that some of the work was done by contractors seems like a bogus argument for not using a public domain equivalent license. Has it been tested in court? After all, the federal government used taxpayer money to pay the contractors.

As of 2015, 1.87% of licenses in use on GitHub were Unlicense.[ref] The implication that taxpayer-paid contractor developed work cannot use a public-domain equivalent license such as the Unlicense is a solidly bogus one. In other words, I am sure that a nonzero fraction of the projects using the Unlicense were developed using contractors, however small that fraction may be.

By your logic, what's keeping you from using a more restrictive license, e.g. CC BY-NC 4.0? Surely that wouldn't stand, so why would Apache License 2.0?

Tomorrow if the government uses commercial AI-based code generators, would the same argument for using the Apache license apply? Why would the treatment of AI-based code generators be different from that of biological ones?

[ctubbsii]

Questions about how the U.S. Government should license its works are great, but this is not the right forum to debate that topic. Those kinds of questions should probably be resolved at a higher level, rather than within a single project like this, so that any policies coming from those discussions can be applied uniformly across government.

Perhaps the question/feedback area of https://code.gov/ would be a more appropriate location to discuss that topic.