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Very cool to see government sponsored open source.

IMHO investing in open source is one of the most strategic things that the US government can do over the upcoming decades. Think about how many trillions of dollars in value has been built on open source software in the US... it's mind boggling how much ROI there is on that stuff.

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This software was developed by employees of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), an agency of the Federal Government and is being made available as a public service. Pursuant to title 17 United States Code Section 105, works of NIST employees are not subject to copyright protection in the United States.

Keep reading. It's surely open source, but the license is mixed due to reuse of previous work that was CC-By 3.0 and similar.

An R package that I did was blocked from CRAN solely because they wanted me to choose a license from a fixed menu and I legally could not. Such policy creates a perverse incentive to not acknowledge previous work or to rationalize about the point at which the code is so mutated that it is no longer derivative.

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