10 ms·

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 w

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.
vharuck 6y ago
We're working with Microsoft on a new data warehouse for analysts, and I'd say the biggest drawback is how everything's a committee decision. We also have a data warehouse for our online public query system, but it's run in house. It's so easy to modify it or propose additions; I just email the guy in charge, CC his boss, and those two will decide if it's worth the time within a day. The Microsoft warehouse? We still don't have it after a few years. Everything runs through multiple committees from multiple teams on our end before it's even brought up with the Microsoft rep. It's a terrible game of "whisper down the line," and too few players understand enough of the whole system. I don't know what's practical for the stack, Microsoft doesn't know what's practical for analysis, and the middlemen don't know how to prioritize anything. The public servants with access to all the info don't have time to coordinate this; that's why we contracted it out.
ocdtrekkie 6y ago
> The major reason that proprietary software is so prominent in gov is corruption. I'd like to see more open source software in government, but the main reason we select proprietary solutions where I work is support. If more open source tools had support staff, maintenance agreements, etc. more government organizations (and businesses) would consider them viable. I may be fairly code-literate IT, but I don't understand a given product as well as the support staff from the company that made it.
- afarrell 6y ago
  Code is a liability. Teams which can encapsulate complexity for others are an asset.
- robocat 6y ago
  > If more open source tools had support staff, maintenance agreements, etc Supply is surely not the issue, there is simply a lack of demand at a reasonable price. The usual billion dollar failed proprietary IT project could pay for an equivalent open source implementation with equivalent support. Most government simply doesn’t demand open source as a preference, and proprietary software suppliers overwhelmingly prefer to supply solutions that gift them vendor lock-in and monopoly rent extraction. Edit: large software corporates demand open source suppliers, or they bring open source talent in-house: government should follow their example. Large software corporates do it right (e.g. I met someone working on PostgreSQL but getting paid by Microsoft the other day). Disclaimer: I am a co-founder of small proprietary software company with some government clients.
- majkinetor 6y ago
  That's common complaint. However, in my experience, proprietary support, especially on supportive technologies isn't that great either. It also seems more likely to find local expert on FOSS technology given that barrier to entry is 0.
  - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
    The barrier to entry is far from zero. Understanding a platform enough to make code fixes takes a fair bit of study beyond the most trivial project. For businesses and government, support is often mandatory, and at the least, it gives administrators "people to blame" when something goes wrong. I feel open source with paid support is a very viable route for government, given it's general expectation of having paid support for the products it uses, but there's still an extreme minority of businesses successfully monetizing open source software.
fsflover 6y ago
> Since its taxpayers money, any custom made software for gov MUST be FOSS or we can equally abandon any logic whatsoever This is why Free Software Foundation Europe created a petition to make all publicly paid code public: https://publiccode.eu https://publiccode.eu.
- majkinetor 6y ago
  Bulgaria seems to have it: https://thepolicy.us/bulgaria-got-a-law-requiring-open-source-98bf626cf70a https://thepolicy.us/bulgaria-got-a-law-requiring-open-sourc...
  - pc86 6y ago
    When's the last time Bulgaria developed spy satellite or fighter jet software?
    - Avamander 6y ago
      Whataboutism. There's a lot of non-militaristic software that could be FOSS.
      - pc86 6y ago
        That's a fair argument but it's definitely not "whataboutism" by any definition.
        jhardy54 6y ago
        I mean, it's 'whaboutism' by some definitions, it's just that those definitions aren't the ones that the rest of the world uses. :~)
    - jasonjayr 6y ago
      The spy satellite or fighter jet software doesn't have to be on Github, but it also doesn't have to be locked up in the vaults @ Boeing or Northrup Grumman, and only accessed or improved at a huge fee by a rent-seeking corporation, who will discharge developers who are experts, and for another obnoxious fee only offer to retrain them, if they happen to still have access to the source code that might have been lost in that fire years ago.
yholio 6y ago
This is not only true for software developed with public funds, but with any software that becomes critical for providing public services, communication in particular. Take for example the recent 5G spying debacle. US claims that the Chinese can insert snooping tech in their hardware, which is of course true. But the same thing is true for gear produced by American or European companies, so we are expected to choose based on the respectability of the political regime or some such and keep our fingers crossed. This whole issue goes away if all critical infrastructure services, regardless of origin, can only operate in "source available" mode, if full FOSS is not economically feasible.
- mulmen 6y ago
  How do I know that the cell tower I connect to is running the firmware I personally verified on github.gov?
  - yholio 6y ago
    The trust you have in the phone company is another target of attack than the one discussed here, the fact that operators need to trust closed source blobs in their networks, often times provided by other states with strategic interests in what goes on over their networks.
    - mulmen 6y ago
      Maybe I wasn’t clear. Even if the government publishes the source of whatever I am interacting with how do I know the source they publish is the same source I am interacting with? Nothing stops them from adding some malicious patch before deploying the open code. It’s all still based on trust.
      - yholio 6y ago
        You are talking about the full chain of trust. I'm an talking about a single link of that chain, the ability of the operators to know their hardware is not under the control of some foreign state actor. This is the topic of the 5G wars. It's a necessary but clearly insufficient condition for what you ask.
mulmen 6y ago
I love Postgres but it really does not do what Oracle does, even today and definitely not 15 years ago. My tax dollars paid for the M1 Abrams and the USS Enterprise but they won’t let me take either for a joyride. I still derive utility from those expenditures. It’s the same with software. If corruption is the problem I’m not sure how software licenses solve it.
- hannofcart 6y ago
  Even assuming that Oracle does indeed have some features that Postgres does not (even with some extension), one will still need to make the case that _that_ specific Oracle feature is indispensable to a given government project.
  - paulryanrogers 6y ago
    It's more likely that Oracle's flagship DB has been 'certified' in some way. Even if such certification is developed by Larry's own lobbyists on his dime. Not that certification is bad generally. Just that it often becomes a tool if regulatory capture.
  - kube-system 6y ago
    Requirements for large projects are always more than technical. The killer feature of proprietary software is the power of the purse. Often, a reason large organizations buy proprietary software is because of the power structure created when you have a legally binding contract with the sole maintainer of the project. The #1 customer of a proprietary product has quite a bit of power to influence and shape how the vendor spends their development cycles. For FOSS, you are often cooperating with (or at least partially reliant on) people who have no financial incentive to favor your priorities.
- pydry 6y ago
  >I love Postgres but it really does not do what Oracle does Right, Postgres doesn't have aggressive salespeople trying to convince key decisionmakers in your enterprise to switch away from Oracle.
RobRivera 6y ago
I have a bold opinion. I believe it is to the benefit of a State that their software be kept secret or proprietary. Of the many reasons i have to believe this, I will say one is as a matter of national security. I hope my public opinion opens a fruitful dialogue.
- GordonS 6y ago
  There was a top post on HN just the other day about "security by obscurity", and how the concept is often misunderstood. You are invoking the age-old closed vs open source argument - essentially, security by obscurity, but I'm not convinced it's a boon in this case. I believe govs using OSS is a net positive for humankind: there are many more minds and eyeballs on the code, and many more beneficiaries of the code.
jandrewrogers 6y ago
There are a few other real-world aspects to the development and use of open source in government that make it more complex in my experience. First, priorities and roadmaps for collaborative software development tend to be captured by the biggest and best funded government organization involved. A famous version of this is that the US government effectively drives the roadmap of international software development collaborations by virtue of readily spending money that their partner governments can't or won't match. The effects of resource disparities in development collaboration often lead to the practical effect that smaller organizations are not having their needs met and what little resources they do have are consumed by the overhead created by the resource scale of the big partners. Second, quite a lot of proprietary software development within government has strict dependencies on closed source software for which there are neither open source equivalents nor likely to be open source equivalents for the foreseeable future. In these cases, open sourcing the government code generates relatively little value for other contributors while incurring the significant operational overhead that is inherent in open sourcing software. Third, even in cases where the government software is open sourced, the projects are frequently unusable by other orgs because the software is effectively unsupported. Under government rules, you generally aren't allowed to spend a couple hours helping any random dev that emails you on what is essentially a support issue -- you are expressly not being paid to work on unrelated projects. A lot of government code that is open sourced is de facto abandonware, including much of the software I worked on, because there is no framework to provide support for the user base either formally or informally. Unlike with non-government open source, which tends to be responsive to random questions from the ether, emailing devs on government open source projects often goes to /dev/null. I agree that the big consulting primes do a terrible job at software delivery but government doesn't have a good track record of effective open source software development either, for other structural reasons.
- zapita 6y ago
  What about continuing to rely on private contractors, but with a mandate to open-source everything they develop with public funds? Perhaps that would address the issues you describe?
  - 6y ago
vmception 6y ago
So although Government generated IP titles are prohibited except by one-off statutes, the government can engage in work-for-hire or any auto-acquire titles to accomplish the same thing, which is what it does. So this is how it owns patents, copyrights, closed source software, etc
Barrin92 6y ago
I don't agree with this. The government should purchase software or services based on quality of the service provided and cost. It's nice if the software is open source, but it doesn't need to be just because tax payers pay for it. That's a total non-sequitur. If the government buys Mercedes cars it doesn't demand Mercedes to hand over the engineering designs for the cars. In fact in the entire military and intelligence space I don't even think this is practically possible due to secrecy and avoiding to give away software that is vital to national security. Another obviously giant issue is that this would effectively prohibit companies which do proprietary work in the private sector to work with the government at the same time, because they'd be forced to open source their code. The likely result of this would simply be that the government has significantly less software to chose from, higher cost, or needs to start maintaining large engineering teams to replicate entire software stacks just for public use.
- rbecker 6y ago
  > I don't agree with this. Probably because you missed the "custom made" part. > secrecy and avoiding to give away software that is vital to national security. This would obviously be an exception and the code wouldn't be publicized. But that doesn't mean it can't be open-source to the government itself. > this would effectively prohibit companies who do proprietary work in the private sector to work with the government at the same time, because they'd be forced to open source their code. Developing open-source code doesn't mean you have to open-source all your code. Windows is still closed-source despite Visual Studio Code being open.
  - Barrin92 6y ago
    So taking your example, the government could not use Windows unless Microsoft decides to open-source it? You realise how much infrastructure of the government runs on Windows right? And not just the operating system itself, but large parts of the software on top, you'd basically have to spend, I don't know dozens of billions to port it all to open-source software, just so you get the source code? Mind you that open-source software is not free, Redhat charges you money just the same for enterprise software I don't think that's a reasonable use of taxpayer money.
dzhiurgis 6y ago
I agree, just don't make it into something stupid like GPL. Also just because you've released the source after it doesn't make more secure, valuable or whatever. It should be developed in public to begin with.
- Avamander 6y ago
  It's the only way to avoid large companies turning it into their own projects and selling that for a large markup, with very little benefit to the taxpayer and some extra user freedom infringement sprinkled on top. Even something like LGPL allows taking freedoms from users and it could be blatantly seen from the Polish eDowod software issue (that's still ongoing).
  - dzhiurgis 6y ago
    By selling those they are becoming a tax payer. You are basically arguing that there's limited amount of pie and we can't create more...
    - Avamander 6y ago
      > By selling those they are becoming a tax payer. Given the massive amount of tax-evasion there are doubts about that. And I'm not arguing that there's limited amount of pie. I'm arguing that it's not okay to make people pay for pie, lace it with cardboard and ask them to pay for it again.
  - pabs3 6y ago
    The GPL doesn't prevent large companies from selling software. Mobile phone vendors sell Linux based Android devices all the time and Linux is GPL.
    - RealStickman_ 6y ago
      Android is open source though.
Aunche 6y ago
>Since its taxpayers money, any custom made software for gov MUST be FOSS I don't follow this logic. I can't think of any case where I view the source code of software that I paid for.
- bo1024 6y ago
  That you paid for a copy of, or that you paid for being developed in the first place?
- de_watcher 6y ago
  Well, too bad.
dragonwriter 6y ago
> Since its taxpayers money, any custom made software for gov MUST be FOSS or we can equally abandon any logic whatsoever For the federal government, it would make more sense for it to be public domain (not subject to copyright), the same as federal works generally. State government works are generally.copyright by the state just as if the state were a private actor, with no particular mandated licensing scheme, so arguably the same ought to be true of software. OTOH, for software used in automating state administration, the source code is arguably a form of documentation of process that ought to be disclosable under sunshine laws even if the software isn't licensed in a way that allows use other than informational reference.
- Dylan16807 6y ago
  Public domain is a subset of FOSS.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

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.

vharuck 6y ago

We're working with Microsoft on a new data warehouse for analysts, and I'd say the biggest drawback is how everything's a committee decision. We also have a data warehouse for our online public query system, but it's run in house. It's so easy to modify it or propose additions; I just email the guy in charge, CC his boss, and those two will decide if it's worth the time within a day. The Microsoft warehouse? We still don't have it after a few years. Everything runs through multiple committees from multiple teams on our end before it's even brought up with the Microsoft rep. It's a terrible game of "whisper down the line," and too few players understand enough of the whole system. I don't know what's practical for the stack, Microsoft doesn't know what's practical for analysis, and the middlemen don't know how to prioritize anything. The public servants with access to all the info don't have time to coordinate this; that's why we contracted it out.

ocdtrekkie 6y ago

> The major reason that proprietary software is so prominent in gov is corruption. I'd like to see more open source software in government, but the main reason we select proprietary solutions where I work is support. If more open source tools had support staff, maintenance agreements, etc. more government organizations (and businesses) would consider them viable. I may be fairly code-literate IT, but I don't understand a given product as well as the support staff from the company that made it.

afarrell 6y ago
Code is a liability. Teams which can encapsulate complexity for others are an asset.
robocat 6y ago
> If more open source tools had support staff, maintenance agreements, etc Supply is surely not the issue, there is simply a lack of demand at a reasonable price. The usual billion dollar failed proprietary IT project could pay for an equivalent open source implementation with equivalent support. Most government simply doesn’t demand open source as a preference, and proprietary software suppliers overwhelmingly prefer to supply solutions that gift them vendor lock-in and monopoly rent extraction. Edit: large software corporates demand open source suppliers, or they bring open source talent in-house: government should follow their example. Large software corporates do it right (e.g. I met someone working on PostgreSQL but getting paid by Microsoft the other day). Disclaimer: I am a co-founder of small proprietary software company with some government clients.
majkinetor 6y ago
That's common complaint. However, in my experience, proprietary support, especially on supportive technologies isn't that great either. It also seems more likely to find local expert on FOSS technology given that barrier to entry is 0.
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  The barrier to entry is far from zero. Understanding a platform enough to make code fixes takes a fair bit of study beyond the most trivial project. For businesses and government, support is often mandatory, and at the least, it gives administrators "people to blame" when something goes wrong. I feel open source with paid support is a very viable route for government, given it's general expectation of having paid support for the products it uses, but there's still an extreme minority of businesses successfully monetizing open source software.

fsflover 6y ago

> Since its taxpayers money, any custom made software for gov MUST be FOSS or we can equally abandon any logic whatsoever This is why Free Software Foundation Europe created a petition to make all publicly paid code public: https://publiccode.eu https://publiccode.eu.

majkinetor 6y ago
Bulgaria seems to have it: https://thepolicy.us/bulgaria-got-a-law-requiring-open-source-98bf626cf70a https://thepolicy.us/bulgaria-got-a-law-requiring-open-sourc...
- pc86 6y ago
  When's the last time Bulgaria developed spy satellite or fighter jet software?
  - Avamander 6y ago
    Whataboutism. There's a lot of non-militaristic software that could be FOSS.
    - pc86 6y ago
      That's a fair argument but it's definitely not "whataboutism" by any definition.
      - jhardy54 6y ago
        I mean, it's 'whaboutism' by some definitions, it's just that those definitions aren't the ones that the rest of the world uses. :~)
  - jasonjayr 6y ago
    The spy satellite or fighter jet software doesn't have to be on Github, but it also doesn't have to be locked up in the vaults @ Boeing or Northrup Grumman, and only accessed or improved at a huge fee by a rent-seeking corporation, who will discharge developers who are experts, and for another obnoxious fee only offer to retrain them, if they happen to still have access to the source code that might have been lost in that fire years ago.

yholio 6y ago

This is not only true for software developed with public funds, but with any software that becomes critical for providing public services, communication in particular. Take for example the recent 5G spying debacle. US claims that the Chinese can insert snooping tech in their hardware, which is of course true. But the same thing is true for gear produced by American or European companies, so we are expected to choose based on the respectability of the political regime or some such and keep our fingers crossed. This whole issue goes away if all critical infrastructure services, regardless of origin, can only operate in "source available" mode, if full FOSS is not economically feasible.

mulmen 6y ago
How do I know that the cell tower I connect to is running the firmware I personally verified on github.gov?
- yholio 6y ago
  The trust you have in the phone company is another target of attack than the one discussed here, the fact that operators need to trust closed source blobs in their networks, often times provided by other states with strategic interests in what goes on over their networks.
  - mulmen 6y ago
    Maybe I wasn’t clear. Even if the government publishes the source of whatever I am interacting with how do I know the source they publish is the same source I am interacting with? Nothing stops them from adding some malicious patch before deploying the open code. It’s all still based on trust.
    - yholio 6y ago
      You are talking about the full chain of trust. I'm an talking about a single link of that chain, the ability of the operators to know their hardware is not under the control of some foreign state actor. This is the topic of the 5G wars. It's a necessary but clearly insufficient condition for what you ask.

mulmen 6y ago

I love Postgres but it really does not do what Oracle does, even today and definitely not 15 years ago. My tax dollars paid for the M1 Abrams and the USS Enterprise but they won’t let me take either for a joyride. I still derive utility from those expenditures. It’s the same with software. If corruption is the problem I’m not sure how software licenses solve it.

hannofcart 6y ago
Even assuming that Oracle does indeed have some features that Postgres does not (even with some extension), one will still need to make the case that _that_ specific Oracle feature is indispensable to a given government project.
- paulryanrogers 6y ago
  It's more likely that Oracle's flagship DB has been 'certified' in some way. Even if such certification is developed by Larry's own lobbyists on his dime. Not that certification is bad generally. Just that it often becomes a tool if regulatory capture.
- kube-system 6y ago
  Requirements for large projects are always more than technical. The killer feature of proprietary software is the power of the purse. Often, a reason large organizations buy proprietary software is because of the power structure created when you have a legally binding contract with the sole maintainer of the project. The #1 customer of a proprietary product has quite a bit of power to influence and shape how the vendor spends their development cycles. For FOSS, you are often cooperating with (or at least partially reliant on) people who have no financial incentive to favor your priorities.
pydry 6y ago
>I love Postgres but it really does not do what Oracle does Right, Postgres doesn't have aggressive salespeople trying to convince key decisionmakers in your enterprise to switch away from Oracle.

RobRivera 6y ago

I have a bold opinion. I believe it is to the benefit of a State that their software be kept secret or proprietary. Of the many reasons i have to believe this, I will say one is as a matter of national security. I hope my public opinion opens a fruitful dialogue.

GordonS 6y ago
There was a top post on HN just the other day about "security by obscurity", and how the concept is often misunderstood. You are invoking the age-old closed vs open source argument - essentially, security by obscurity, but I'm not convinced it's a boon in this case. I believe govs using OSS is a net positive for humankind: there are many more minds and eyeballs on the code, and many more beneficiaries of the code.

jandrewrogers 6y ago

There are a few other real-world aspects to the development and use of open source in government that make it more complex in my experience. First, priorities and roadmaps for collaborative software development tend to be captured by the biggest and best funded government organization involved. A famous version of this is that the US government effectively drives the roadmap of international software development collaborations by virtue of readily spending money that their partner governments can't or won't match. The effects of resource disparities in development collaboration often lead to the practical effect that smaller organizations are not having their needs met and what little resources they do have are consumed by the overhead created by the resource scale of the big partners. Second, quite a lot of proprietary software development within government has strict dependencies on closed source software for which there are neither open source equivalents nor likely to be open source equivalents for the foreseeable future. In these cases, open sourcing the government code generates relatively little value for other contributors while incurring the significant operational overhead that is inherent in open sourcing software. Third, even in cases where the government software is open sourced, the projects are frequently unusable by other orgs because the software is effectively unsupported. Under government rules, you generally aren't allowed to spend a couple hours helping any random dev that emails you on what is essentially a support issue -- you are expressly not being paid to work on unrelated projects. A lot of government code that is open sourced is de facto abandonware, including much of the software I worked on, because there is no framework to provide support for the user base either formally or informally. Unlike with non-government open source, which tends to be responsive to random questions from the ether, emailing devs on government open source projects often goes to /dev/null. I agree that the big consulting primes do a terrible job at software delivery but government doesn't have a good track record of effective open source software development either, for other structural reasons.

zapita 6y ago
What about continuing to rely on private contractors, but with a mandate to open-source everything they develop with public funds? Perhaps that would address the issues you describe?
- 6y ago

vmception 6y ago

So although Government generated IP titles are prohibited except by one-off statutes, the government can engage in work-for-hire or any auto-acquire titles to accomplish the same thing, which is what it does. So this is how it owns patents, copyrights, closed source software, etc

Barrin92 6y ago

I don't agree with this. The government should purchase software or services based on quality of the service provided and cost. It's nice if the software is open source, but it doesn't need to be just because tax payers pay for it. That's a total non-sequitur. If the government buys Mercedes cars it doesn't demand Mercedes to hand over the engineering designs for the cars. In fact in the entire military and intelligence space I don't even think this is practically possible due to secrecy and avoiding to give away software that is vital to national security. Another obviously giant issue is that this would effectively prohibit companies which do proprietary work in the private sector to work with the government at the same time, because they'd be forced to open source their code. The likely result of this would simply be that the government has significantly less software to chose from, higher cost, or needs to start maintaining large engineering teams to replicate entire software stacks just for public use.

rbecker 6y ago
> I don't agree with this. Probably because you missed the "custom made" part. > secrecy and avoiding to give away software that is vital to national security. This would obviously be an exception and the code wouldn't be publicized. But that doesn't mean it can't be open-source to the government itself. > this would effectively prohibit companies who do proprietary work in the private sector to work with the government at the same time, because they'd be forced to open source their code. Developing open-source code doesn't mean you have to open-source all your code. Windows is still closed-source despite Visual Studio Code being open.
- Barrin92 6y ago
  So taking your example, the government could not use Windows unless Microsoft decides to open-source it? You realise how much infrastructure of the government runs on Windows right? And not just the operating system itself, but large parts of the software on top, you'd basically have to spend, I don't know dozens of billions to port it all to open-source software, just so you get the source code? Mind you that open-source software is not free, Redhat charges you money just the same for enterprise software I don't think that's a reasonable use of taxpayer money.

dzhiurgis 6y ago

I agree, just don't make it into something stupid like GPL. Also just because you've released the source after it doesn't make more secure, valuable or whatever. It should be developed in public to begin with.

Avamander 6y ago
It's the only way to avoid large companies turning it into their own projects and selling that for a large markup, with very little benefit to the taxpayer and some extra user freedom infringement sprinkled on top. Even something like LGPL allows taking freedoms from users and it could be blatantly seen from the Polish eDowod software issue (that's still ongoing).
- dzhiurgis 6y ago
  By selling those they are becoming a tax payer. You are basically arguing that there's limited amount of pie and we can't create more...
  - Avamander 6y ago
    > By selling those they are becoming a tax payer. Given the massive amount of tax-evasion there are doubts about that. And I'm not arguing that there's limited amount of pie. I'm arguing that it's not okay to make people pay for pie, lace it with cardboard and ask them to pay for it again.
- pabs3 6y ago
  The GPL doesn't prevent large companies from selling software. Mobile phone vendors sell Linux based Android devices all the time and Linux is GPL.
  - RealStickman_ 6y ago
    Android is open source though.

Aunche 6y ago

>Since its taxpayers money, any custom made software for gov MUST be FOSS I don't follow this logic. I can't think of any case where I view the source code of software that I paid for.

bo1024 6y ago
That you paid for a copy of, or that you paid for being developed in the first place?
de_watcher 6y ago
Well, too bad.

dragonwriter 6y ago

> Since its taxpayers money, any custom made software for gov MUST be FOSS or we can equally abandon any logic whatsoever For the federal government, it would make more sense for it to be public domain (not subject to copyright), the same as federal works generally. State government works are generally.copyright by the state just as if the state were a private actor, with no particular mandated licensing scheme, so arguably the same ought to be true of software. OTOH, for software used in automating state administration, the source code is arguably a form of documentation of process that ought to be disclosable under sunshine laws even if the software isn't licensed in a way that allows use other than informational reference.

Dylan16807 6y ago
Public domain is a subset of FOSS.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]