Indeed. Anything that can wind up in a courtroom or a research journal should be at least open source, if not public domain, especially if public funding is involved.

I might point to an old program called NIH Image that was somewhat common on the Mac platform as a substitute for Photoshop — it was written by an NIH programmer (unfortunately in Pascal, making it a dusty deck these days) and included some great tools for image transforms that were especially useful for medical purposes. I believe the VA also has some top-notch medical records software that is public domain, but almost nobody uses it. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that any software that is developed by the government or on the government’s dime should be public domain or open source; given that it’s already paid for, there’s no good reason that anything of that nature shouldn’t be free to the taxpayers.