Bill requiring US agencies to share source code with each other becomes law

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President Joe Biden signed the bipartisan legislation into law Dec. 23.

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Agencies will have to share custom-developed code amongst each other in an effort to prevent duplicative software development contracts under a new bill signed into law by President Joe Biden.

The bipartisan Source Code Harmonization And Reuse in Information Technology (H.R. 9566), or SHARE IT Act, takes aim at reducing the roughly $12 billion that lawmakers estimated the federal government spends each year on software purchases by requiring agencies to publicly list custom code and share that code with other agencies.

Doing so, bill sponsors said, will address the inefficiency that can happen when agencies unknowingly hire contractors to develop code that has already been developed for another agency. The new law doesn’t apply to classified code, national security systems or code that would post privacy risks if shared.

The legislation was sponsored by Sens. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Gary Peters, D-Mich., in the Senate and Reps. Nicholas Langworthy, R-N.Y., and William Timmons, R-S.C., in the House. Both chambers approved the bill with overwhelming support in December, without recorded up or down votes.

Under the law, agency chief information officers are required to develop policies within 180 days of enactment that implement the act. Those policies need to ensure that custom-developed code aligns with best practices, establish a process for making the metadata for custom code publicly available, and outline a standardized reporting process. 

Per the new law, metadata includes information about whether custom code was developed under a contract or shared in a repository, the contract number, and a hyperlink to the repository where the code was shared.

The legislation also had industry support. According to an announcement from Langworthy on the bill’s House introduction in September, collaborative software companies Atlassian and GitLab Inc. backed the legislation.

At the time, Stan Shepard, Atlassian’s general counsel, said in a statement in the release that the company shares “the belief that greater collaboration and sharing of custom code will promote openness, efficiency, and innovation across the federal enterprise.” 

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