Government projects are often paid for using public funds, unless it is a grant from a donor. Being publicly-funded projects, ownership is automatically given to its citizens, i.e., every tax-paying Filipino owns it. Projects that are have no impact on the country’s national security must be transparently disclosed to all.

Software projects commissioned by the government, with no risk to national security, must be licensed under a particular open source license. The license must allow anyone access to the source code -- free to get, free to modify and free to distribute.

You DO NOT need permission to access it, modify it and/or distribute it. However, depends on the open source license, commercializing it may or may not be restricted.

Without a defining open source license that the government can slap on each software project, there is no option but to revert back to the old ways of protecting intellectual property.

The problem is this - the government can claim that the software source code is freely available to the public, but you need permission. Here’s the twist, there is NO guarantee that permission will be granted.

Access is another thing, modification and distribution are different matters. Modifying the source code to make a better software is the gist of every open source software project. If no modification is allowed, the license is similar to a popular commercial software’s look-but-no-touch policy with their source code.

And worse, government projects have no guarantee that further funding will be provided to improve the software, let alone maintain it (heck, the government cannot maintain it for lack of expertise, i.e., people transfer to industry for higher pay).

Distribution of modified software is another thing, of course. The license may allow commercial distribution any software derived from the original government funded project. This is very friendly to the local software industry - gives them a chance to improve on the software and get paid.

This, however, does not prevent the changes to be submitted to the government for possible adoption to the original software -- to improve it. Win for both software industry and the government.

On the other hand, distribution may be restricted, i.e., one cannot profit from it. This is not unheard of in the open source community and there is nothing wrong with this. The government is not in the business selling or licensing publicly-funded projects, imho.

Frankly, I do think that this is the best model for any government-funded software project.

The agency that should be in the forefront of this should be the Commission on Information and Communications Technology (CICT), or perhaps the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT). It is the CICT’s job to craft this open source license or to review existing open source licenses and specify which one is the most appropriate for our use.

It is NOT acceptable for CICT not to be able to advise other government agencies, when asked about licensing. So, if you have a government software project, go ask CICT and see what they will tell you.
Remember, open source licenses, as approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI, http://opensource.org), are globally recognized. Heck, even the University of California BSD, University of Illinois/NCSA and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) licenses are there.