Intuitively makes sense until you realize that there are similarly a lot of line of business apps that are used and implemented again and again across federal a

Intuitively makes sense until you realize that there are similarly a lot of line of business apps that are used and implemented again and again across federal agencies. For example, every classified document has a classification level (Secret, Top Secret, with more details on it). And the functionality to roll up the classification is re-implemented by every contractor every single system. So even within ONE agency, every system's implementation is done from scratch. It's the perfect kind of thing that could've been an open source library (still in a classified network though), but still extremely valuable. It's something I built and recommended to my superiors ten years ago when I worked for a government contractor, but we didn't get much traction for various reasons. (Cynically, most contractors want the free money to reimplement it, so they aren't going to stop that gravy train.) So there is a LOT of room even within each single agency, to share code that is common to their business practices. You'll be hard pressed to find an area in any large organization (public or private) that couldn't benefit from the efficiencies of reuse.