Not just open source, public domain. I also see that any pull request submitters must automatically agree to dedicate their work to the public domain for some of the repos I looked at.
Wow I feel kinda dumb I never even heard of U.S. General Services Administration let alone all the public domain software they’ve created. My only question is, is any of it useful for a pleb like me or is it public domain for transparencies sake?
Honestly I have no idea, some of it looks like good examples of what bureaucratic software development produces. I personally guarantee that almost all of that software is probably written by contractors 😹
We believe that software created by the government should be shared with the public, and we want to collaborate with civic-minded peers to make this happen.
There’s also the NSA’s Ghidra which is a competitor for the best open source application IMO. Previously the only tool for heavy-duty reverse engineering was IDA Pro, which is very expensive (and not open source, of course). The NSA has selfish incentives to have tools like this be open source - free training especially - but it’s still a very good thing.
Don’t feel too bad. A lot of more complicated Java programs utilize JNI with platform-specfic code, so even if you knew it was Java, it’s not a given that it works on Linux - especially given the incredibly complicated nature of decompilation, and that Ghidra has a DSL to define processors/“languages”.
I wish America had this mindset
https://github.com/orgs/GSA/repositories?type=all
Not just open source, public domain. I also see that any pull request submitters must automatically agree to dedicate their work to the public domain for some of the repos I looked at.
Wow I feel kinda dumb I never even heard of U.S. General Services Administration let alone all the public domain software they’ve created. My only question is, is any of it useful for a pleb like me or is it public domain for transparencies sake?
Honestly I have no idea, some of it looks like good examples of what bureaucratic software development produces. I personally guarantee that almost all of that software is probably written by contractors 😹
There is some movement, but it isn’t nearly enough.
https://code.mil/
Thanks for sharing I didn’t even know this existed.
There’s also the NSA’s Ghidra which is a competitor for the best open source application IMO. Previously the only tool for heavy-duty reverse engineering was IDA Pro, which is very expensive (and not open source, of course). The NSA has selfish incentives to have tools like this be open source - free training especially - but it’s still a very good thing.
I don’t know anything about reverse engineering but this seems like fills a void as you mentioned. Thanks for sharing. Is there a fork for Linux?
Ghidra is written in Java which is cross-platform.
Thanks I just read that after editing the post 🤦♂️
Don’t feel too bad. A lot of more complicated Java programs utilize JNI with platform-specfic code, so even if you knew it was Java, it’s not a given that it works on Linux - especially given the incredibly complicated nature of decompilation, and that Ghidra has a DSL to define processors/“languages”.