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An unpopular opinion I guess, but the article is saying if you receive government funding, it should be open source. That's more than just government employees

An unpopular opinion I guess, but the article is saying if you receive government funding, it should be open source. That's more than just government employees making code. It's also any company, individual or agency that even accepts $1 of public grant money or any external contracts. We're talking about hundreds of thousands of coders who's daily job is partially funded by the government having to push their code public. I worked for an ad agency for a time that created websites and sent emails for tourism. The tourism website needs to be open source? The program that sends out discount coupons to public attractions and parks? Each HTML email I code needs to be submitted to repository somewhere? I don't think people realize just how many millions of lines of code per day we're talking about here. Most of them being inconsequential things. 99.999999% of that being noise. You've just jacked up the cost of working with the government. More time spent coding. More documentation for things that shouldn't need it. More time spent with compliance issues. Companies need to charge more. More tax dollars wasted.

dwheeler 8y ago
No, you just reduced the costs of everything. ONLY the code the government paid for development is being discussed. If 1% of the development was paid for by direction of the government, then at most we're talking 1%. The bigger problem today is that the government re-builds things 1000 times.
coryrc 8y ago
Yes, you should need to make it open source. There's no reason to have a different backend for every town in the USA; less work for you to do and less money to be spent redundantly.
basseq 8y ago
> the article is saying if you receive government funding, it should be open source. Despite the headline, the article actually doesn't state that. It says thing like, "any government code produced with public money", "all software developed for the government", and "any source code written by the government must be released".

dwheeler 8y ago

No, you just reduced the costs of everything. ONLY the code the government paid for development is being discussed. If 1% of the development was paid for by direction of the government, then at most we're talking 1%. The bigger problem today is that the government re-builds things 1000 times.

coryrc 8y ago

Yes, you should need to make it open source. There's no reason to have a different backend for every town in the USA; less work for you to do and less money to be spent redundantly.

basseq 8y ago

> the article is saying if you receive government funding, it should be open source. Despite the headline, the article actually doesn't state that. It says thing like, "any government code produced with public money", "all software developed for the government", and "any source code written by the government must be released".