3 ms·

I'm not saying everything done is open source. I'm saying it's less common in regulated industries. NDA / sensitive government work -> FOIA makes restrictions

I'm not saying everything done is open source. I'm saying it's less common in regulated industries. NDA / sensitive government work -> FOIA makes restrictions tough. I can request government source code. Trade secrets -> The government can't really keep trade secrets. I guess if I were working with classified code? Hard-coded exceptions -> Not specific to regulated industries but bad design. Legal possibility -> This is not a legal possibility. A legal possibility is paying damages. It's the same if I break a proprietary license too (for example, accidentally ship out a copy of a library I paid for just one license with my product).

kube-system 6y ago
FOIA has a substantial list of exemptions, and many of them would apply to a lot of code that the government uses. Above, I was referring to trade secrets in the private sector, but actually, that is one of the FOIA exemptions too. Also, a lot of code running in production is poorly designed. I'd bet the vast majority of it is poorly designed. Damages are one part of it, but you also have to return to compliance, which means you either have to follow the license or stop using the code. Given that the AGPL doesn't have linking exceptions, the concern is that might be all of an organization's code. That's not to say that you can't use open source in industries where these might be concerns -- almost all other common open source licenses don't have this problem.