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Indeed. I work at a public institution. Our department is paid by many other institutions around the country (networks). Our code is scary and terrifying. It's

Indeed. I work at a public institution. Our department is paid by many other institutions around the country (networks). Our code is scary and terrifying. It's 95% perl5. We run bare metal on nearly everything. We have only the barest notions of a testbed. Put it this way: if we were required to release our code, nobody would use our services. Frankly, I'm surprised it runs at all. (BTW, other horror stories.. $DB_password in line 200 or so. No primary keys in our DB - or foreign for that matter. We have no idea of a schema... And on and on and on.)

wiz21c 9y ago
I work in public sector too. Some of my code could definitely released (hell, we know about tests, we have thousands of them :-)) For example, we double check a lot of persons' "status" in our programs. We do these checks to ensure that when someone requests help (for example, financial help) for these persons, they are entitled to receive that help. Now that "someone" is a bunch of other institutions as well as a bunch of private sector operators. They would benefit to see what sort of checks we do. That would help them to understand why we sometimes refuse to help some persons, they could learn from our stuff. That would also help other organisations (e.g. activits/NGO) to criticize the quality of our code (because what we do is quite connected to interpreting the law, thus a second opinion would definitely be useful). Although I'm all for those two benefits, one has to realize that they are politically incorrect. The first one because, by keeping knowledge you just make your institution more important. The second one because a public institution must give the impression that it is perfect (because you run on public's money...). edit: (oh and since "it" has happened in the past : this my own opinion, not reflecting the one of my employer)
- type0 9y ago
  Good points. I also think that PR departments would cry out loud if the bugs in publicly founded software were too easy to find. The believe in security by obscurity is just too strong there... Their mindset usually is: "better keep it hidden, even if we leak citizens private informations all over the internet." "and at least our funding won't be removed because some shitty paper stumbles on those leaks and makes a big deal about it".

wiz21c 9y ago

I work in public sector too. Some of my code could definitely released (hell, we know about tests, we have thousands of them :-)) For example, we double check a lot of persons' "status" in our programs. We do these checks to ensure that when someone requests help (for example, financial help) for these persons, they are entitled to receive that help. Now that "someone" is a bunch of other institutions as well as a bunch of private sector operators. They would benefit to see what sort of checks we do. That would help them to understand why we sometimes refuse to help some persons, they could learn from our stuff. That would also help other organisations (e.g. activits/NGO) to criticize the quality of our code (because what we do is quite connected to interpreting the law, thus a second opinion would definitely be useful). Although I'm all for those two benefits, one has to realize that they are politically incorrect. The first one because, by keeping knowledge you just make your institution more important. The second one because a public institution must give the impression that it is perfect (because you run on public's money...). edit: (oh and since "it" has happened in the past : this my own opinion, not reflecting the one of my employer)

type0 9y ago
Good points. I also think that PR departments would cry out loud if the bugs in publicly founded software were too easy to find. The believe in security by obscurity is just too strong there... Their mindset usually is: "better keep it hidden, even if we leak citizens private informations all over the internet." "and at least our funding won't be removed because some shitty paper stumbles on those leaks and makes a big deal about it".