While I think it would be nice if community changes make it upstream so the government can benifit from the changes this is not the motivating factor. The motiv

While I think it would be nice if community changes make it upstream so the government can benifit from the changes this is not the motivating factor. The motivating factor in my mind is that taxpayers paid for the code they should have the rights to use it. Already if the code is written by a government employee it is in the public domain because the government can't copyright. But in the public domain is not the same thing as publicly available. There have been cases were government employees have written a code base then hired contractors to work on the code and sell the product back to the government at crazy prices. And then when the government wants the source code make a change they can't get because the code base is now proprietary. And the government is forced to pay the contractor outrageous sums to make a change to what originally was the government's code.