> (Begin obligatory three-way posting.)

> This week I made www.GovTrack.us officially totally open source.
> GovTrack is a website that tracks U.S. federal legislation and also
> builds the only comprehensive open database of congressional
> information. While the data behind GovTrack has been provided in the
> public domain for a number of years now, and has been successfully
> powering a bunch of other sites like OpenCongress, I've been playing
> catch-up in getting the source code of the website opened up.

> The benefits of open source only come if other people help me develop
> the site, so I hope my time spent opening up the site isn't for nothing!
> (This also comes on the heels of being called a weak link in the
> transparency web <g>, so this ought to address some of those concerns.)

> Basically there are three components to GovTrack:

> The website front-end, i.e. the system that generates the HTML pages of
> the site. This is newly open source. I hope others will contribute new
> features and usability improvements.

> The legislative database, i.e. the XML files. This has been and
> continues to be public domain.

> The website back-end, which is the collection of screen-scraping Perl
> scripts that create and update the legislative database. I previously
> posted some of these files publicly, but now I am licensing them under
> an open source license, and I am continuing to post more of the scripts
> over time. It takes more time to do this because of Perl module hell,
> dependencies on some external files, and some API keys in the files.

> The front-end and back-end are licensed under the new GNU AGPL license,
> which basically means that you cannot modify the files without making
> the modifications publicly available. This is intended to prevent
> commercial services from gaining any advantage from the source files
> that they couldn't already get from using my legislative database
> directly (as anyone can). I'm pretty thankful that such a license came
> into being (and, importantly, with the backing of lawyers that know what
> they're talking about), since otherwise I would have been more reluctant
> to do this.

> More details are here:
> http://www.govtrack.us/source.xpd

> Regards,

> --
> - Josh Tauberer
> - GovTrack.us

> http://razor.occams.info

> "Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation!  Yields
> falsehood when preceded by its quotation!" Achilles to
> Tortoise (in "Godel, Escher, Bach" by Douglas Hofstadter)