Fascinating — but I'd be curious how much of the production was funded with those licensing fees. Maybe they're not legally obligated to keep it public — but ethically?
If you subsist entirely on grants and charitable donations and you yourself are a charity then I think it’s reasonable that your software should be open source.
There’s actually a push for all custom developed code for the US government be open sourced, even if produced by a contractor. Seems reasonable to me.
Keep in mind there is a balance where the "ask" for receiving government funding may prevent the creation of the work in the first place.
Sometimes, the right balance may be to require the work to contractually enter the public domain in return for receiving funding. Sometimes, the government could negotiate something less than in order to get a net benefit.
