US government commits to publish publicly financed software under FOSS licenses 10 years ago
There are actually foundations out there that do exactly that. If you're interested, OSET Foundation (http://www.osetfoundation.org/#welcome) has developed everything from ballot scanners to entry systems. It's all open source and they've been at it for about 10 years. They patented some of their systems and made the Secretary of commerce the owner of these patents, as far as I'm aware. Legislation is slowly moving towards adoption, given the potential reduction in cost.