French citizens have a right to request source code developed by their administration. This includes source code developed by public research labs. But the research sector has a distinct place in the "public code" landscape. It produces open source gems like scikit-learn, and many researchers contribute to Free Software, but some source code is never published because public labs are requested to use them as assets for new startups. This talk will explore this distinct place, the work that has been done in France to promote the publication of research source code and the challenges ahead.