[dkhenry]

It would be really cool if they let the devs use their public names and GitHub accounts to commit. As of right now it is WH-NewMedia, and there is no history. Makes me think this is a marketing excersize rather then a new leaf in federal software development.

[zacharycohn]

I doubt it's a marketing exercise. There are people who really are trying to change things from inside. It takes time, and it takes a lot of small steps. Why don't you contact them and encourage them to use individual public names?

[dkhenry]

I don't doubt there are people on the inside trying to change things, and I applaud their efforts, but I would hate to see their efforts hijacked by the political arm thinking they can sell us a bill of goods and get a bunch of free press.

[nhebb]

I would believe that more if there were a single White House petition that resulted in action. Even their SOPA petition response was pretty murky.

[HistoryInAction]

Here I'll weigh in. Working with groups like Public Knowledge and EFF in killing SOPA, we were going to lose the Senate on PIPA until the President weighed in. We heard from Senate staffers who felt there was an arrangement between the parties until the President (through IP staffer Victoria Espinal) put out his statement.

The White House letter, as murky and contradictory as it was, represented a clear break with its previous unequivocal support for the MPAA/RIAA position.

[nowarninglabel]

What does whether or not a petition is responded to have to do with open-sourcing code in a White House repo? Your complaint is like if Mac open sourced a component of OS X and you went on a rant about them not moving work out of abusive factories in China due to a petition.

[kennywinker]

True, but it's hard to disentangle the product from the thing that produced it. If Apple open sourced a product, I would fully expect to see criticism of their policies (probably around openness and and transparency, rather than labour) in any collective reaction.

[zacharycohn]

I don't see how petitions are at all relevant.

What is relevant is programs like this: http://www.whitehouse.gov/innovationfellows

[kennywinker]

Pull request merging so far have all been done by one Peter Welsch (https://github.com/welschp). Seems like this is happening. Perhaps these are white house specific alts, but still pretty public.