I wonder if source code can be requested under the Freedom of Information Act. The act only applies to the executive branch but that's still probably a lot of software.

I was told my work could be requested under the FOIA when I programmed for the army.

I'm not sure of the details, but this may be complicated by the fact that a lot of government source code was produced by outside contractors.

This varies widely but our website code is definitely owned by NASA - they even run the version control system to make sure that other contractors don't "forget" to give it to them.

Yes, an example is Vista. It is electronic medical record software for the Veterans Affairs department. See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VistA

Many times, those pieces of software integrate with commercial third party components. In most of those cases, the government produced software is basically just glue to bind together lots of libraries.

In other words, it would likely be useless.

Well, that's how Expect became public domain...