15 ms·

Governments should adopt and invest in FOSS

362 points by nivenkos 6y ago

fouc 6y ago
Let's go further than this though. Governments should all follow the China model and have their own firewalls, support their own software industries, and splinter the internet. Also support institutes that do work in FOSS.
clintonb 6y ago
I agree. I’ve seen a few models work in other industries. MIT’s OpenCourseWare (OCW) and edX initiatives relied on partnerships with other universities and institutions. They all pay in to fund the development of the underlying platform. OpenEdX has individual and institutional contributors that help improve it. Smaller credit unions join forces to form credit union service organizations (CUSOs) that provide a service (e.g., IT support, or lending services) to all member credit unions. I would love to see US state and local governments do something similar. Start with everyone’s favorite state office: the DMV. I’ve lived in three states. The DMV experience for all three has been pretty bad. This is more frustrating as an software engineer because it is painfully obvious where a bit of software could have a huge improvement. It makes no sense that 50+ states and territories have 50+ systems for the DMV, business registration, taxes, etc. when the basic functionality is most likely the same across all of them.
- shadowfox 6y ago
  > It makes no sense that 50+ states and territories have 50+ systems for the DMV, business registration, taxes, etc. when the basic functionality is most likely the same across all of them. While this is likely true, this being the US, you are also very likely going to end up in an ideological (for the lack of a better word) rabbit hole about freedom and state's right to do their own thing.
  - bobthepanda 6y ago
    This is exactly what happened to Common Core.
  - microcolonel 6y ago
    This is why the open source angle is so crucial. If the expertise is distributed well between the stakeholder states, it can produce more state sovereignty, because it is at least plausible to fork. It serves the best arguments of both nativism and globalism, without really harming the values of either.
eddietejeda 6y ago
If you are interested in this topic, checkout https://code.gov/ https://code.gov/ “The Federal Source Code Policy (FSCP) called for the establishment of the the Code.gov program office and corresponding technical platform of a website and application programming interface (API). The program office assists agencies with policy, acquisition, and code inventory creation. We are a small but mighty team with five members with expertise and beliefs pertaining to discovering, sharing, and open sourcing the People's code.” You may also want to read up on 18f.gsa.gov. They publish and share lots of open source code. I started at 18F and now run https://github.com/cloud-gov https://github.com/cloud-gov
- petepete 6y ago
  Also have a look at the GOV.UK/GDS[0], which strongly influenced the US Digital Service. Pretty much everything digital that government departments do is open by default[1] [0] https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/government-digital-service https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/government-digit... [1] https://github.com/alphagov https://github.com/alphagov
GartzenDeHaes 6y ago
Unfortunately, that isn't how government works. Whether it's F35's or Microsoft Office, putting money into the pockets of political cronies is what drives the purchase. FOSS doesn't benefit anyone with power, so it's useless to the government.
- prepend 6y ago
  I suppose it depends on the government, but my experience is that it’s more about familiarity and ease of maintenance. In the US there are few actual digital services/ engineering / hackers who are employees. Mostly project managers and contract admins. So it’s frustrating to me seeing a mediocre commercial solution purchased because it’s easier to support than equivalent OSS that requires just a single person who knows how to admin something simple like Wordpress. The number of times I’ve heard that SharePoint is superior to Wordpress for intranet and content management because it had better support would boggle any reasonable mind. No one is paying political cronies, just people trying to do their best without any direct understanding of what it takes to run these types of services. I think the solution is to require a rigorous analysis of OSS in solution contracts. Then all the contractors supporting SharePoint will just support WordPress and funnel the license savings into more contractors.
- an_opabinia 6y ago
  I’ve got news for you dude, cronyism is a lot worse when selling to corporations.
  - xapata 6y ago
    When people complain about government inefficiency I always wonder if they've ever worked at a large company.
  - extremeMath 6y ago
    No. With government the stakes are significantly higher as governments don't go out of business.
fallat 6y ago
So the reasons are: cost, contributions, and audits. I'm playing devil's advocate here and think this could be an interesting thought exercise. There is no evidence or proof any of the above are advantageous to governments. 1. Cost - Does it cost more for an existing solution, that maybe other governments and companies have paid toward, than adding features to a solution without all the bells and whistles? 2. Do you want other governments to receive the improvements? 3. Do you want other governments to be able to audit your ("you" being the government) software? It is more effective to hire a specialized audit team or have random code readings by random people?
- spurdoman77 6y ago
  My toughts: 2. Yes, in areas where other governments profit isnt your loss. I think there are lots of these. For example, if you have software which makes people more healthy, you wont lose if people in other countries get healthier as well. 3. Yes, similarly in many areas others auditing the software is harmless.
  - sjy 6y ago
    I have found that not everyone in the public sector would agree with (2). By giving away the software you lose the ability to sell it and recover some of the money you spent on it. Similarly, funding the development of proprietary software involves less capital expenditure because the developer can charge less than they spend and still profit by selling to others. I don’t believe that either of these arguments are sound, but it’s hard to respond to them when the experts on how software development should be done are the contractors who benefit from these arrangements.
- xapata 6y ago
  Open source software is a public good. The government is responsible for creating and maintaining public goods. Where's the dissonance?
majkinetor 6y ago
Since its taxpayers money, any custom made software for gov MUST be FOSS or we can equally abandon any logic whatsoever - citizens payed for it, gov employees were working with implementation team on shaping it, so it belongs to them. This doesn't have to be so for supportive domains such as databases but I would personally prefer that also (i.e. Postgresql instead Oracle db). There are many more reasons for this then mentioned, including keeping more IT experts locally, better connections with academia, higher salaries for gov IT guys, less corruption etc. The MAJOR thing is actually that gov companies and their systems are usually quite complex and not something that can be easily (or at all) correctly done by external team of any kind - you need to be there, on the spot, and live that system for years to know how to program it, improve it, and make it good for the country and its citizens. I worked for gov 15 years, and did many huge projects with various companies - IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Cisco etc... almost all being complete garbage, especially for the usual multi billion price that is payed to those corps yearly. There is an illusion that big names mean big and qualified team, good responsibility delegation (there is the 'nobody got fired for choosing IBM' thing) and that high price means quality, but in practice it never works like that, reality is quite the opposite (except responsibility delegation/dispersion which is totally true). The major reason that proprietary software is so prominent in gov is corruption.
- deelowe 6y ago
  I gave up thinking the government believes they work for the citizenship about a decade ago.
  - xapata 6y ago
    The government isn't a monolith. It's people, each with different incentives and values.
  - fsflover 6y ago
    Learned helplessness at its best.
- choward 6y ago
  I agree completely. It's ridiculous seeing different cities, counties, states, etc reimplementing the same stuff from scratch. I realize every region is different but not that different.
remir 6y ago
I have said this for years: all the building blocks are here. What's missing is the integration, UX/UI polish, and of course, the resources to do so. If enough public administrations are on board with this, then this could be game changer. We could have something that trickle down to the general population. Something on the same level of polish as Windows or MacOS.
pkz 6y ago
1. I think many public sector organizations in Europe lack basic knowledge of FOSS and have IT managers that don't even know what it is. 2. In many ways it is surprising that generic software like cloud office functionality in reality only have two suppliers, both from the US, in the public sector. The amount of money that is being paid by tax payers every year for that across the EU is staggering. Maybe the Schrems 2 court decision will change #2 eventually but for the time being I see very few alternatives.
- ghego1 6y ago
  > 1. I think many public sector organizations in Europe lack basic knowledge of FOSS and have IT managers that don't even know what it is. Confirmed. Source: I teach these topics in University, including in post graduate courses for public officials, and most of the students don't have a clue of what OSS means (the whole words), and don't even realize why the F matters. I usually explain what source code is, and from there all they way down to that F. I am deeply convinced that one, if not the the most, worrying problem of our times is a general lack of proper education in all levels of societies, except for a small portion of the population.
  - pkz 6y ago
    I clicked the upvote on your comment but wanted to put a sad emoji...
just-juan-post 6y ago
No mention of what is the greatest government contribution which is SELinux from the NSA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security-Enhanced_Linux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security-Enhanced_Linux SELinux is what keeps an attacker contained after they exploit and break into the system.
MattGaiser 6y ago
I work for a government software development team (At least for the next week). I have other friends in other governments on other teams. I can’t see a government being able to build generalized software or contribute effectively to it. Governments don’t tend to have people who say no to feature requests. The end result is not a generalized good solution, but extremely specific solutions built on a generalized platform of if statements and endless configuration setups with special cases weaved through. Governments are used to getting to decree everything from the button shade to the location of the buttons (different departments might ask for different button placements and get it) to the database type used (for the same piece of software) to the cloud vendor to all manner of additional features that require threading them through the core software. They want piles of exceptions and special cases. They want every possible scenario from the paper based days to be included in the software or it is not sufficient for their purposes. They want to specify date formats. They want to have very custom reports. To use OSS, you basically need a generalized thing many people can use. But each government department will rapidly make it far from generalized.
- salimancer 6y ago
  100% agree. I do R&D in the defense industry and scope creep is an absolute nightmare. The only times I get to say no are when the laws of physics dictate so.
- oska 6y ago
  You're assuming the government controls the development process. That's not the objective (and frankly, FOSS licences works against control, as any party can fork the code). Rather, the suggestion is for governments to support FOSS developers, just as they do the arts community, without directly dictating what work they do. If they want a project extended in a certain way they can pay directly for that development, but they should do it on the back of an existing product that serves the general community and feed useful development of the software from their extension back into the general development tree.
  - paulryanrogers 6y ago
    Standards may help commoditize the more fundamental parts. It was the government that created ASCII and SQL after all. At least back when they cared about competition.
specialist 6y ago
"Citizen owned software." Phrasing I used on the stump, both campaigning and as an activist. Overwhelming support. One of those 90/10 issues. People just get it. Resolutions, petitions, platforms practically write themselves. Forewarning for any future advocates: Appeal directly to the rank & file, Jane Public, editorial boards. Organize bottom up. I can't recall any elected or appointed person supporting (publicly). Free advice (and twice as valuable): You must have solutions. Real code. My topic was election admin. I couldn't resolve the chicken & egg problem. Any green field efforts would need $10m just to wage the legal battles (certifications, in every jurisdiction). So figure out a way to get existing code into the light.
- pc86 6y ago
  How did you square this goal with nearly every election expert (I'm talking academics here, not politicians) being against using more technology in elections?
  - specialist 6y ago
    There's a lot more to elections than just the tabulators. Maps, databases, candidate filings, calendars, ballot production, voter guides, signature management, poll books, reports, ballot tracking, translation services, etc. Since the collapse of the touchscreen business, the new business model is rent seeking on steroids. Charging jurisdictions per unit prices for every single one of those tasks and artifacts. Every voter every election, whether the voter cast a ballot or not. On the stump, I explained that "citizen owned software" applies to both the intellectual property and the business model.
afarrell 6y ago
I think one easy mistake to make is thinking about this as an investment in software as a technical artefact. Which is more valuable for deterring war: A. An $80 million fighter jet with dysfunctional communication among its maintenance, logistics, and air combat teams. B. An organisation which can resiliently perform effective aerial interdiction and communicate the resulting intelligence clearly and swiftly. B, right? So too with peaceful investments. Governments should invest in teams with the capability to: 1. Understand the needs of the public, prioritised through some healthy democratic-representative process. 2. Write and refactor high-quality software as that nourishes the public good. 3. Empower members of the public to educate themselves on how to contribute to this public commons. Open-Source code itself? Eh, writing code is fun. When you take care of the team, the team takes care of the code.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
BlueTemplar 6y ago
jamesmcm.github.io The author criticizes a lot Microsoft and hypes FLOSS, while being hosted on a closed source, Microsoft-owned platform.
- waldohatesyou 6y ago
  This has nothing to do with his point
29athrowaway 6y ago
IMO, essential FOSS projects should be seen the same as infrastructure. It is not unheard of to see millions spent on bridges, highways, etc. Well, office suites, operating systems, and the myriad of FOSS projects used every day are as useful as that physical infrastructure. Especially in this day and age.
MrsPeaches 6y ago
See also the Dutch Ministry of Health has it's own GitHub account[1] Their coronavirus tracking app is open source [2] And their Minister for Health made the commit to send the app website live [3] (though he did push to master on a Friday. I guess you can do that if you're the Minister...) [1] https://github.com/minvws https://github.com/minvws [2] https://github.com/minvws/nl-covid19-notification-app-ios https://github.com/minvws/nl-covid19-notification-app-ios [3] https://github.com/minvws/nl-covid19-notification-app-website/commit/ce16c03b221c1ba1f18035f3a11907039c663871 https://github.com/minvws/nl-covid19-notification-app-websit...
edoceo 6y ago
Oof, see the disaster that is regulated cannabis software. $3M for stuff that was hacked the day after launch and still routinely fails two years later. And the government has simply changed the definition of success so it looks like it wasn't. All the while the agency is rebuilding the reports the taxpayers paid for, and we're supposed to be delivered 24 months ago with Excel - and training LEOs how to ignore and filter out garbage data from the system to do their job.
atakiel 6y ago
I think the largest barrier for FOSS is still that the greater public doesn't know about FOSS, at all, and even less at the concept level. Because FOSS largely is still not on the daily political agenda, there's no actual talk among the wider masses about the reasons why FOSS is important, or what it actually means. Without wider discussion it's harder for it to gain foothold, as it is very much a political question, when it comes to use of FOSS in government. Although, this seems to be slowly changing. In Finland, YLE (the national broadcasting company) has recently been systematically bringing up the open source nature of the national Covid app in their reporting. I think there's a larger cultural revolution waiting for its turn, behind the current open source revolution that has been happening so far mostly in the software field. In its core, open source is a cultural thing, and maybe a political one, one that due to reasons that were, did found rooting and cultivation initially in the field of software. Regardless of its origins, it's a wider movement that could disrupt every aspect of content creation, if realized as such. E.g. the same discussion that is being had in this thread and in the original article, about FOSS in government, largely applies to a wide field of other types of content created by governments. One of the larger, self created obstacles for open source lies in the definition itself. Open source is still being defined primarily in the realm of software, and through software. Names and definitions such as FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) reprise this problem by anchoring the concept to the world of software, and in this case, it happens already in the name. Instead of FOSS, maybe we should be talking about FOS software? I think the world could do well with a concept of open source that could be unleashed on all types of content created [1]. FOSS could probably do well, with the larger umbrella concept of FOS hitting daily discussion. Interestingly, open source as a term doesn't have this package, as source can mean more than just source code. [1] Creative commons already exists, but that's mainly a license, to be used in certain fields of content creation, not a wider definition for the concept.
sien 6y ago
Government does use and create a great deal of open source software. Github has this list of government and community organisations that use Github : https://government.github.com/community/ https://government.github.com/community/ The organisation that I work for has over 200 Github repositories. The Australian government alone from that Github list is literally supporting thousands of open source repositories. It looks like many other governments around the world are doing the same. It would be worth going out and working out how many open source repositories governments are supporting.
- sien 6y ago
  Australia's CSIRO has their own bitbucket repo: https://bitbucket.csiro.au/repos?visibility=public https://bitbucket.csiro.au/repos?visibility=public (CSIRO also has quite a few repositories on Github as well)
oska 6y ago
This is exactly how Europe (and other parts of the world) can avoid having their IT services monopolised by US American companies. And build up ecosystems of expertise around the free software projects.
NomDePlum 6y ago
GDS, a department of the UK government already advocates the use and creation of open source software: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/be-open-and-use-open-source https://www.gov.uk/guidance/be-open-and-use-open-source Including publishing a lot here: https://github.com/alphagov https://github.com/alphagov A lot of the philosophy of their approach on this is around making the code public and inspectable given it was funded by tax payers. Not to say reuse isn't part of it but it is an interesting angle on why some code should be open sourced.
SergeAx 6y ago
Lots of software commissioned by Italian govt is open sourced: https://developers.italia.it/en/ https://developers.italia.it/en/
holidayacct 6y ago
You're looking for Germany and Suse Linux.
earthboundkid 6y ago
A lot of this discussion is thinking about government procurement, and yes absolutely, custom software that the government commissions should be OSS unless national security prevents it, and in that case, they and not the contractors should retain the copyright. But there’s another issue: government should approach funding OSS like funding scientific or medical research. If you want to cure cancer, you find a government grant, write up a proposal, get your proposal scored, and if all goes well get to conduct your research. The exact same process should apply for OSS.
natmaka 6y ago
In France this is exactly the goal of an association founded in 2002, see (in French) https://adullact.org/index.php/association https://adullact.org/index.php/association
- tasogare 6y ago
  It seems they just focus on the cost while the real problem is of sovereignty, and need to include an European dimension. The US have been found spying on the whole world (including their own citizens), so it’s warranted Europeans push back against US hardware and software the same way it’s done with China (Huawei).
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    The problem is that to sort it out properly we need a complete EU based stack, starting from the hardware.
    - snvzz 6y ago
      >starting from the hardware. There's absolutely no need to start from the hardware. In fact, both hardware and software can and should be done in parallel.
  - natmaka 6y ago
    Disclaimer: I don't write on their behalf. They don't neglect sovereignty, which is quite present in their communication (sample: https://adullact.org/21-espace-presse https://adullact.org/21-espace-presse , https://adullact.org/65-actualite/agenda/854-colloque-sur-la-souverainete-des-donnees-territoriales-le-4-juin-2019 https://adullact.org/65-actualite/agenda/854-colloque-sur-la... ). My personal experience lets me suppose that the main challenge for the audience of this association is budget-related, and if so it is of paramount importance for it to (right off the bat) announce that free software reduces the TCO. I'm more and more unconvinced by the present instance of the "Europe" thingie, and in any case an opensource project does not need gigantic bureaucratico-jacobinists organizations, in fact such ordeal will IMHO quickly derail it.
dhruvio 6y ago
Wanted to share that my province, British Columbia, is pretty good about this. My team was hired to build BC’s Digital Marketplace (https://digital.gov.bc.ca/marketplace https://digital.gov.bc.ca/marketplace), which procures teams to build software for government that is licensed under the Apache 2 License!
2Gkashmiri 6y ago
I have a question here. How do you combat lobbying when you have the likes of Microsoft so deeply entrenched in a government, the likes of Germany and Limux and the whole deal there. Same in India. The government has set aside a proper budget to spending towards buying Microsoft products for office use when 10% of that sum could build world class software but lobbying. I once pitched libreoffice to a head of a India government department and I was told in as many words "the central government gives us a proper budget for this. If we don't spend it, it will lapse. Let it be. " Next, I use some taxation software provided by central government but its all excel based. Why cant they essentially switch to the likes of using Foss software because the chain effect of the cunsumers of these software have to stick to excel. On and on. If anyone can help pass the message, let me know
systematical 6y ago
I work as a government contractor. We've fixed bugs in OSS that we've used, but been unable to contribute the fixes back. This is a huge hassle because we are now on a fork and have to deal with merges from upstream, it will get worse over time. More recently I developed a missing (in my view) extension to a piece of software. Too make this OSS-able would take a few extra hours and I wouldn't mind doing that step on my own time. But that's a nope. So we can use OSS, we can modify OSS, but we can't contribute PRs or new software. At least for the three letter agency I work with. Lots of the type of applications being developed in the public sector aren't really any different then private sector. They take data in, they do something with it, and they output data. If the software doesn't require a security clearance, you should be able open source it IMO or at least contribute PRs.
- executesorder66 6y ago
  Why are you unable to merge your changes upstream?
  - systematical 6y ago
    I was given some nebulous answer and well I have my own OSS projects on the side that I care more about so I don't care to push that. WTS. I would be happy to do the last mile on my own, but I am not going to fight for it. It should instead be encouraged buts its not. So here we are. I have good contributions to make but don't. Some good OSS projects losing out and by a thin proxy, many other three letter agencies. The most I do is contribute to OSS documentation on gov time and just don't bring it up. Also fix issues by replying to issues since thats not code.
    - executesorder66 6y ago
      Well I'd say it would be totally worth it to push back on that and insist that you be allowed to merge your stuff upstream. Even if it's for no other reason than ease of maintenance, so you don't have to keep merging upstream to your fork.
alien_ 6y ago
FOSS is a Commons, in my opinion every organization, government and company should use it as much as possible and invest in it a fraction of their IT budget, even if just 1%. This would add up to resolve the current FOSS funding problems and the FOSS ecosystem would thrive. They could do it by hiring developers or FOSS companies and/or funding targeted to the projects they use with a subscription like Tidelift.
browserface 6y ago
I hope some governments adopt my FOSS remote browser isolation product: https://github.com/dosyago/OuterShell https://github.com/dosyago/OuterShell
ryaan_anthony 6y ago
Starting with voting machines!
jokull 6y ago
Iceland is doing this (in a big way). TypeScript stack, 18 teams from different companies working together in the same open source code base and design system. HMU if you want to know more. Was an advisor on it.

362 points by nivenkos 6y ago

fouc 6y ago

Let's go further than this though. Governments should all follow the China model and have their own firewalls, support their own software industries, and splinter the internet. Also support institutes that do work in FOSS.

clintonb 6y ago

I agree. I’ve seen a few models work in other industries. MIT’s OpenCourseWare (OCW) and edX initiatives relied on partnerships with other universities and institutions. They all pay in to fund the development of the underlying platform. OpenEdX has individual and institutional contributors that help improve it. Smaller credit unions join forces to form credit union service organizations (CUSOs) that provide a service (e.g., IT support, or lending services) to all member credit unions. I would love to see US state and local governments do something similar. Start with everyone’s favorite state office: the DMV. I’ve lived in three states. The DMV experience for all three has been pretty bad. This is more frustrating as an software engineer because it is painfully obvious where a bit of software could have a huge improvement. It makes no sense that 50+ states and territories have 50+ systems for the DMV, business registration, taxes, etc. when the basic functionality is most likely the same across all of them.

shadowfox 6y ago
> It makes no sense that 50+ states and territories have 50+ systems for the DMV, business registration, taxes, etc. when the basic functionality is most likely the same across all of them. While this is likely true, this being the US, you are also very likely going to end up in an ideological (for the lack of a better word) rabbit hole about freedom and state's right to do their own thing.
- bobthepanda 6y ago
  This is exactly what happened to Common Core.
- microcolonel 6y ago
  This is why the open source angle is so crucial. If the expertise is distributed well between the stakeholder states, it can produce more state sovereignty, because it is at least plausible to fork. It serves the best arguments of both nativism and globalism, without really harming the values of either.

eddietejeda 6y ago

If you are interested in this topic, checkout https://code.gov/ https://code.gov/ “The Federal Source Code Policy (FSCP) called for the establishment of the the Code.gov program office and corresponding technical platform of a website and application programming interface (API). The program office assists agencies with policy, acquisition, and code inventory creation. We are a small but mighty team with five members with expertise and beliefs pertaining to discovering, sharing, and open sourcing the People's code.” You may also want to read up on 18f.gsa.gov. They publish and share lots of open source code. I started at 18F and now run https://github.com/cloud-gov https://github.com/cloud-gov

petepete 6y ago
Also have a look at the GOV.UK/GDS[0], which strongly influenced the US Digital Service. Pretty much everything digital that government departments do is open by default[1] [0] https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/government-digital-service https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/government-digit... [1] https://github.com/alphagov https://github.com/alphagov

GartzenDeHaes 6y ago

Unfortunately, that isn't how government works. Whether it's F35's or Microsoft Office, putting money into the pockets of political cronies is what drives the purchase. FOSS doesn't benefit anyone with power, so it's useless to the government.

prepend 6y ago
I suppose it depends on the government, but my experience is that it’s more about familiarity and ease of maintenance. In the US there are few actual digital services/ engineering / hackers who are employees. Mostly project managers and contract admins. So it’s frustrating to me seeing a mediocre commercial solution purchased because it’s easier to support than equivalent OSS that requires just a single person who knows how to admin something simple like Wordpress. The number of times I’ve heard that SharePoint is superior to Wordpress for intranet and content management because it had better support would boggle any reasonable mind. No one is paying political cronies, just people trying to do their best without any direct understanding of what it takes to run these types of services. I think the solution is to require a rigorous analysis of OSS in solution contracts. Then all the contractors supporting SharePoint will just support WordPress and funnel the license savings into more contractors.
an_opabinia 6y ago
I’ve got news for you dude, cronyism is a lot worse when selling to corporations.
- xapata 6y ago
  When people complain about government inefficiency I always wonder if they've ever worked at a large company.
- extremeMath 6y ago
  No. With government the stakes are significantly higher as governments don't go out of business.

fallat 6y ago

So the reasons are: cost, contributions, and audits. I'm playing devil's advocate here and think this could be an interesting thought exercise. There is no evidence or proof any of the above are advantageous to governments. 1. Cost - Does it cost more for an existing solution, that maybe other governments and companies have paid toward, than adding features to a solution without all the bells and whistles? 2. Do you want other governments to receive the improvements? 3. Do you want other governments to be able to audit your ("you" being the government) software? It is more effective to hire a specialized audit team or have random code readings by random people?

spurdoman77 6y ago
My toughts: 2. Yes, in areas where other governments profit isnt your loss. I think there are lots of these. For example, if you have software which makes people more healthy, you wont lose if people in other countries get healthier as well. 3. Yes, similarly in many areas others auditing the software is harmless.
- sjy 6y ago
  I have found that not everyone in the public sector would agree with (2). By giving away the software you lose the ability to sell it and recover some of the money you spent on it. Similarly, funding the development of proprietary software involves less capital expenditure because the developer can charge less than they spend and still profit by selling to others. I don’t believe that either of these arguments are sound, but it’s hard to respond to them when the experts on how software development should be done are the contractors who benefit from these arrangements.
xapata 6y ago
Open source software is a public good. The government is responsible for creating and maintaining public goods. Where's the dissonance?

majkinetor 6y ago

Since its taxpayers money, any custom made software for gov MUST be FOSS or we can equally abandon any logic whatsoever - citizens payed for it, gov employees were working with implementation team on shaping it, so it belongs to them. This doesn't have to be so for supportive domains such as databases but I would personally prefer that also (i.e. Postgresql instead Oracle db). There are many more reasons for this then mentioned, including keeping more IT experts locally, better connections with academia, higher salaries for gov IT guys, less corruption etc. The MAJOR thing is actually that gov companies and their systems are usually quite complex and not something that can be easily (or at all) correctly done by external team of any kind - you need to be there, on the spot, and live that system for years to know how to program it, improve it, and make it good for the country and its citizens. I worked for gov 15 years, and did many huge projects with various companies - IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Cisco etc... almost all being complete garbage, especially for the usual multi billion price that is payed to those corps yearly. There is an illusion that big names mean big and qualified team, good responsibility delegation (there is the 'nobody got fired for choosing IBM' thing) and that high price means quality, but in practice it never works like that, reality is quite the opposite (except responsibility delegation/dispersion which is totally true). The major reason that proprietary software is so prominent in gov is corruption.

deelowe 6y ago
I gave up thinking the government believes they work for the citizenship about a decade ago.
- xapata 6y ago
  The government isn't a monolith. It's people, each with different incentives and values.
- fsflover 6y ago
  Learned helplessness at its best.
choward 6y ago
I agree completely. It's ridiculous seeing different cities, counties, states, etc reimplementing the same stuff from scratch. I realize every region is different but not that different.

remir 6y ago

I have said this for years: all the building blocks are here. What's missing is the integration, UX/UI polish, and of course, the resources to do so. If enough public administrations are on board with this, then this could be game changer. We could have something that trickle down to the general population. Something on the same level of polish as Windows or MacOS.

pkz 6y ago

1. I think many public sector organizations in Europe lack basic knowledge of FOSS and have IT managers that don't even know what it is. 2. In many ways it is surprising that generic software like cloud office functionality in reality only have two suppliers, both from the US, in the public sector. The amount of money that is being paid by tax payers every year for that across the EU is staggering. Maybe the Schrems 2 court decision will change #2 eventually but for the time being I see very few alternatives.

ghego1 6y ago
> 1. I think many public sector organizations in Europe lack basic knowledge of FOSS and have IT managers that don't even know what it is. Confirmed. Source: I teach these topics in University, including in post graduate courses for public officials, and most of the students don't have a clue of what OSS means (the whole words), and don't even realize why the F matters. I usually explain what source code is, and from there all they way down to that F. I am deeply convinced that one, if not the the most, worrying problem of our times is a general lack of proper education in all levels of societies, except for a small portion of the population.
- pkz 6y ago
  I clicked the upvote on your comment but wanted to put a sad emoji...

just-juan-post 6y ago

No mention of what is the greatest government contribution which is SELinux from the NSA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security-Enhanced_Linux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security-Enhanced_Linux SELinux is what keeps an attacker contained after they exploit and break into the system.

MattGaiser 6y ago

I work for a government software development team (At least for the next week). I have other friends in other governments on other teams. I can’t see a government being able to build generalized software or contribute effectively to it. Governments don’t tend to have people who say no to feature requests. The end result is not a generalized good solution, but extremely specific solutions built on a generalized platform of if statements and endless configuration setups with special cases weaved through. Governments are used to getting to decree everything from the button shade to the location of the buttons (different departments might ask for different button placements and get it) to the database type used (for the same piece of software) to the cloud vendor to all manner of additional features that require threading them through the core software. They want piles of exceptions and special cases. They want every possible scenario from the paper based days to be included in the software or it is not sufficient for their purposes. They want to specify date formats. They want to have very custom reports. To use OSS, you basically need a generalized thing many people can use. But each government department will rapidly make it far from generalized.

salimancer 6y ago
100% agree. I do R&D in the defense industry and scope creep is an absolute nightmare. The only times I get to say no are when the laws of physics dictate so.
oska 6y ago
You're assuming the government controls the development process. That's not the objective (and frankly, FOSS licences works against control, as any party can fork the code). Rather, the suggestion is for governments to support FOSS developers, just as they do the arts community, without directly dictating what work they do. If they want a project extended in a certain way they can pay directly for that development, but they should do it on the back of an existing product that serves the general community and feed useful development of the software from their extension back into the general development tree.
- paulryanrogers 6y ago
  Standards may help commoditize the more fundamental parts. It was the government that created ASCII and SQL after all. At least back when they cared about competition.

specialist 6y ago

"Citizen owned software." Phrasing I used on the stump, both campaigning and as an activist. Overwhelming support. One of those 90/10 issues. People just get it. Resolutions, petitions, platforms practically write themselves. Forewarning for any future advocates: Appeal directly to the rank & file, Jane Public, editorial boards. Organize bottom up. I can't recall any elected or appointed person supporting (publicly). Free advice (and twice as valuable): You must have solutions. Real code. My topic was election admin. I couldn't resolve the chicken & egg problem. Any green field efforts would need $10m just to wage the legal battles (certifications, in every jurisdiction). So figure out a way to get existing code into the light.

pc86 6y ago
How did you square this goal with nearly every election expert (I'm talking academics here, not politicians) being against using more technology in elections?
- specialist 6y ago
  There's a lot more to elections than just the tabulators. Maps, databases, candidate filings, calendars, ballot production, voter guides, signature management, poll books, reports, ballot tracking, translation services, etc. Since the collapse of the touchscreen business, the new business model is rent seeking on steroids. Charging jurisdictions per unit prices for every single one of those tasks and artifacts. Every voter every election, whether the voter cast a ballot or not. On the stump, I explained that "citizen owned software" applies to both the intellectual property and the business model.

afarrell 6y ago

I think one easy mistake to make is thinking about this as an investment in software as a technical artefact. Which is more valuable for deterring war: A. An $80 million fighter jet with dysfunctional communication among its maintenance, logistics, and air combat teams. B. An organisation which can resiliently perform effective aerial interdiction and communicate the resulting intelligence clearly and swiftly. B, right? So too with peaceful investments. Governments should invest in teams with the capability to: 1. Understand the needs of the public, prioritised through some healthy democratic-representative process. 2. Write and refactor high-quality software as that nourishes the public good. 3. Empower members of the public to educate themselves on how to contribute to this public commons. Open-Source code itself? Eh, writing code is fun. When you take care of the team, the team takes care of the code.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

BlueTemplar 6y ago

jamesmcm.github.io The author criticizes a lot Microsoft and hypes FLOSS, while being hosted on a closed source, Microsoft-owned platform.

waldohatesyou 6y ago
This has nothing to do with his point

29athrowaway 6y ago

IMO, essential FOSS projects should be seen the same as infrastructure. It is not unheard of to see millions spent on bridges, highways, etc. Well, office suites, operating systems, and the myriad of FOSS projects used every day are as useful as that physical infrastructure. Especially in this day and age.

MrsPeaches 6y ago

See also the Dutch Ministry of Health has it's own GitHub account[1] Their coronavirus tracking app is open source [2] And their Minister for Health made the commit to send the app website live [3] (though he did push to master on a Friday. I guess you can do that if you're the Minister...) [1] https://github.com/minvws https://github.com/minvws [2] https://github.com/minvws/nl-covid19-notification-app-ios https://github.com/minvws/nl-covid19-notification-app-ios [3] https://github.com/minvws/nl-covid19-notification-app-website/commit/ce16c03b221c1ba1f18035f3a11907039c663871 https://github.com/minvws/nl-covid19-notification-app-websit...

edoceo 6y ago

Oof, see the disaster that is regulated cannabis software. $3M for stuff that was hacked the day after launch and still routinely fails two years later. And the government has simply changed the definition of success so it looks like it wasn't. All the while the agency is rebuilding the reports the taxpayers paid for, and we're supposed to be delivered 24 months ago with Excel - and training LEOs how to ignore and filter out garbage data from the system to do their job.

atakiel 6y ago

I think the largest barrier for FOSS is still that the greater public doesn't know about FOSS, at all, and even less at the concept level. Because FOSS largely is still not on the daily political agenda, there's no actual talk among the wider masses about the reasons why FOSS is important, or what it actually means. Without wider discussion it's harder for it to gain foothold, as it is very much a political question, when it comes to use of FOSS in government. Although, this seems to be slowly changing. In Finland, YLE (the national broadcasting company) has recently been systematically bringing up the open source nature of the national Covid app in their reporting. I think there's a larger cultural revolution waiting for its turn, behind the current open source revolution that has been happening so far mostly in the software field. In its core, open source is a cultural thing, and maybe a political one, one that due to reasons that were, did found rooting and cultivation initially in the field of software. Regardless of its origins, it's a wider movement that could disrupt every aspect of content creation, if realized as such. E.g. the same discussion that is being had in this thread and in the original article, about FOSS in government, largely applies to a wide field of other types of content created by governments. One of the larger, self created obstacles for open source lies in the definition itself. Open source is still being defined primarily in the realm of software, and through software. Names and definitions such as FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) reprise this problem by anchoring the concept to the world of software, and in this case, it happens already in the name. Instead of FOSS, maybe we should be talking about FOS software? I think the world could do well with a concept of open source that could be unleashed on all types of content created [1]. FOSS could probably do well, with the larger umbrella concept of FOS hitting daily discussion. Interestingly, open source as a term doesn't have this package, as source can mean more than just source code. [1] Creative commons already exists, but that's mainly a license, to be used in certain fields of content creation, not a wider definition for the concept.

sien 6y ago

Government does use and create a great deal of open source software. Github has this list of government and community organisations that use Github : https://government.github.com/community/ https://government.github.com/community/ The organisation that I work for has over 200 Github repositories. The Australian government alone from that Github list is literally supporting thousands of open source repositories. It looks like many other governments around the world are doing the same. It would be worth going out and working out how many open source repositories governments are supporting.

sien 6y ago
Australia's CSIRO has their own bitbucket repo: https://bitbucket.csiro.au/repos?visibility=public https://bitbucket.csiro.au/repos?visibility=public (CSIRO also has quite a few repositories on Github as well)

oska 6y ago

This is exactly how Europe (and other parts of the world) can avoid having their IT services monopolised by US American companies. And build up ecosystems of expertise around the free software projects.

NomDePlum 6y ago

GDS, a department of the UK government already advocates the use and creation of open source software: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/be-open-and-use-open-source https://www.gov.uk/guidance/be-open-and-use-open-source Including publishing a lot here: https://github.com/alphagov https://github.com/alphagov A lot of the philosophy of their approach on this is around making the code public and inspectable given it was funded by tax payers. Not to say reuse isn't part of it but it is an interesting angle on why some code should be open sourced.

SergeAx 6y ago

Lots of software commissioned by Italian govt is open sourced: https://developers.italia.it/en/ https://developers.italia.it/en/

holidayacct 6y ago

You're looking for Germany and Suse Linux.

earthboundkid 6y ago

A lot of this discussion is thinking about government procurement, and yes absolutely, custom software that the government commissions should be OSS unless national security prevents it, and in that case, they and not the contractors should retain the copyright. But there’s another issue: government should approach funding OSS like funding scientific or medical research. If you want to cure cancer, you find a government grant, write up a proposal, get your proposal scored, and if all goes well get to conduct your research. The exact same process should apply for OSS.

natmaka 6y ago

In France this is exactly the goal of an association founded in 2002, see (in French) https://adullact.org/index.php/association https://adullact.org/index.php/association

tasogare 6y ago
It seems they just focus on the cost while the real problem is of sovereignty, and need to include an European dimension. The US have been found spying on the whole world (including their own citizens), so it’s warranted Europeans push back against US hardware and software the same way it’s done with China (Huawei).
- pjmlp 6y ago
  The problem is that to sort it out properly we need a complete EU based stack, starting from the hardware.
  - snvzz 6y ago
    >starting from the hardware. There's absolutely no need to start from the hardware. In fact, both hardware and software can and should be done in parallel.
- natmaka 6y ago
  Disclaimer: I don't write on their behalf. They don't neglect sovereignty, which is quite present in their communication (sample: https://adullact.org/21-espace-presse https://adullact.org/21-espace-presse , https://adullact.org/65-actualite/agenda/854-colloque-sur-la-souverainete-des-donnees-territoriales-le-4-juin-2019 https://adullact.org/65-actualite/agenda/854-colloque-sur-la... ). My personal experience lets me suppose that the main challenge for the audience of this association is budget-related, and if so it is of paramount importance for it to (right off the bat) announce that free software reduces the TCO. I'm more and more unconvinced by the present instance of the "Europe" thingie, and in any case an opensource project does not need gigantic bureaucratico-jacobinists organizations, in fact such ordeal will IMHO quickly derail it.

dhruvio 6y ago

Wanted to share that my province, British Columbia, is pretty good about this. My team was hired to build BC’s Digital Marketplace (https://digital.gov.bc.ca/marketplace https://digital.gov.bc.ca/marketplace), which procures teams to build software for government that is licensed under the Apache 2 License!

2Gkashmiri 6y ago

I have a question here. How do you combat lobbying when you have the likes of Microsoft so deeply entrenched in a government, the likes of Germany and Limux and the whole deal there. Same in India. The government has set aside a proper budget to spending towards buying Microsoft products for office use when 10% of that sum could build world class software but lobbying. I once pitched libreoffice to a head of a India government department and I was told in as many words "the central government gives us a proper budget for this. If we don't spend it, it will lapse. Let it be. " Next, I use some taxation software provided by central government but its all excel based. Why cant they essentially switch to the likes of using Foss software because the chain effect of the cunsumers of these software have to stick to excel. On and on. If anyone can help pass the message, let me know

systematical 6y ago

I work as a government contractor. We've fixed bugs in OSS that we've used, but been unable to contribute the fixes back. This is a huge hassle because we are now on a fork and have to deal with merges from upstream, it will get worse over time. More recently I developed a missing (in my view) extension to a piece of software. Too make this OSS-able would take a few extra hours and I wouldn't mind doing that step on my own time. But that's a nope. So we can use OSS, we can modify OSS, but we can't contribute PRs or new software. At least for the three letter agency I work with. Lots of the type of applications being developed in the public sector aren't really any different then private sector. They take data in, they do something with it, and they output data. If the software doesn't require a security clearance, you should be able open source it IMO or at least contribute PRs.

executesorder66 6y ago
Why are you unable to merge your changes upstream?
- systematical 6y ago
  I was given some nebulous answer and well I have my own OSS projects on the side that I care more about so I don't care to push that. WTS. I would be happy to do the last mile on my own, but I am not going to fight for it. It should instead be encouraged buts its not. So here we are. I have good contributions to make but don't. Some good OSS projects losing out and by a thin proxy, many other three letter agencies. The most I do is contribute to OSS documentation on gov time and just don't bring it up. Also fix issues by replying to issues since thats not code.
  - executesorder66 6y ago
    Well I'd say it would be totally worth it to push back on that and insist that you be allowed to merge your stuff upstream. Even if it's for no other reason than ease of maintenance, so you don't have to keep merging upstream to your fork.

alien_ 6y ago

FOSS is a Commons, in my opinion every organization, government and company should use it as much as possible and invest in it a fraction of their IT budget, even if just 1%. This would add up to resolve the current FOSS funding problems and the FOSS ecosystem would thrive. They could do it by hiring developers or FOSS companies and/or funding targeted to the projects they use with a subscription like Tidelift.

browserface 6y ago

I hope some governments adopt my FOSS remote browser isolation product: https://github.com/dosyago/OuterShell https://github.com/dosyago/OuterShell

ryaan_anthony 6y ago

Starting with voting machines!

jokull 6y ago

Iceland is doing this (in a big way). TypeScript stack, 18 teams from different companies working together in the same open source code base and design system. HMU if you want to know more. Was an advisor on it.