30 ms·

Congress should invest in open-source software

692 points by gilad 6y ago

DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
I don't have hard statistics to back this up, but my impression is that Congress has a habit of adding strings and restrictions on whatever they fund. I would hesitate to accept that Faustian bargain.
- eximius 6y ago
  Accessibility would probably be the biggest difficulty that might be legally required through poorly interacting laws. (Not to say that things shouldn't be accessible, but we've already seen good-will gestures ruined because of this case. Some university posts lectures online to be nice, forced to take them down because they aren't accessible.)
  - mtalantikite 6y ago
    The federal government has a requirement by law (called Section 508) that requires agencies to provide people with disabilities equal access to electronic information and data. Agencies have teams whose sole job is to evaluate any software that is built or deployed meets accessibility standards.
  - tehjoker 6y ago
    If they're giving you money, you have the space and ability to do it. I don't see the problem here.
    - eximius 6y ago
      I think you're drastically overestimating how much money would be available per project and underestimating the cost of accessibility.
      - tehjoker 6y ago
        In theory, such a mandate can be adequately resourced and the institution providing the funding clearly has such funds.
R0b0t1 6y ago
This sounds good as a soundbite, but how? Knowing how federal bidding works in general I can't imagine the funds being used constructively, it would end up as some kind of popularity contest.
- dTal 6y ago
  Is that any different than any other "government funds X" proposal? If this is a consistent problem, then government is just plain broken. Which is of course a problem, but an orthogonal one to software funding specifically.
- johnmaguire2013 6y ago
  The article mentions three ideas for how: > All three of these levers for FOSS—direct funding, procurement regulation, and tax incentives—should be included in the next infrastructure bill.
- ebiester 6y ago
  You could run it like NSF grants. https://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_list.jsp?org=nsf&ord=rcnt https://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_list.jsp?org=nsf&ord=rcnt Put 10 million a year for 5 years as an experiment. It takes an extra administrator and some part time experts in the field who are compensated for the work.
  - sitkack 6y ago
    Or SBIR for OSS? https://www.sbir.gov/ https://www.sbir.gov/
- robertlagrant 6y ago
  Money will likely to go those who employ people who are good at writing convincing grant applications. 'Twas ever thus.
- sidlls 6y ago
  FOSS is already to some extent a popularity contest.
alexgmcm 6y ago
If it's paid for by the people, it should belong to the people. Open-source meets this requirement, proprietary software doesn't.
- jburwell 6y ago
  Unless the software is classified, the source code is available via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.
  - Dangeranger 6y ago
    One problem with this approach is that you need to know about the existence of the software in order to craft a FOIA request such that you can see the code, this can mean sending multiple FOIA requests. Combine that with the delay in fulfilling a request, on the order of months, or sometimes longer, and you could be looking at a year or more before you get the source code you were looking for.
  - adrianN 6y ago
    What's the license for code obtained that way? Is it public domain?
    - saagarjha 6y ago
      Government work in general is in the public domain.
      - dwheeler 6y ago
        Work done by US government employees as part of their official duties is in general not under copyright within the US. But that is a much narrower statement. Most software developed using government funds is not exclusively developed by government employees as part of their official duties. Most Government funding of software development goes to contractors, where that rule does not apply. The no copyright only applies to the US, not necessarily outside. Outside the US it definitely can have a copyright. There are also some weird exceptions for government employees, specifically for the u.s. postal service and for certain materials created by NIST.
dimmke 6y ago
For what it's worth, there is a lot of movement in the Federal government to open source code that is written for the government. The GSA, which is the kind of meta agency that helps other federal agencies do stuff talks a lot about this. They also have a site called https://code.gov/ https://code.gov/ that lists open source projects created for the Federal government. A lot of their own repositories are completely open source and they do development in the open. I work on a contract for the CDC and we open sourced an older version of the software we display data on maps in: https://github.com/CDCgov/CDC-Maps https://github.com/CDCgov/CDC-Maps I'm working on switching our development to open so we use the same codebase that is available to everybody and adding other visualizations. It's slow going but there is movement there. I do agree it would be beneficial to fund open source projects, likely by including some requirement in contracts. I think them funding projects directly with cash could cause a lot of problems though. The increase regulations that would need to be added would probably not be worth it for open source projects. People who get funding would likely need to submit a lot of documentation, there'd also probably be weird rules about non U.S. citizens etc... and laws would need to be passed.
- jhardy54 6y ago
  Big +1. I found a small bug in a GSA site (plainlanguage.gov) and was able to PR a fix that was merged almost immediately. It's a shame that we can't do the same with all of the bugs in other government websites.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- mtalantikite 6y ago
  It's definitely becoming more common. Many agencies have organizations up on GitHub where development of various products are done out in the open (for example, https://github.com/cmsgov https://github.com/cmsgov).
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  > I think them funding projects directly with cash could cause a lot of problems though. The increase regulations that would need to be added would probably not be worth it for open source projects. People who get funding would likely need to submit a lot of documentation, there'd also probably be weird rules about non U.S. citizens etc... and laws would need to be passed. I think 18F's modular contracting methodology is highly effective for this sort endeavor, if you can take the opinion that they're the sponsor and benevolent dictator driving that part of the codebase (and the code developed is open sourced upon confirmation acceptance criteria has been met). Thank you for switching to an open development model. A rising tide lifts all boats. https://18f.gsa.gov/2019/04/09/why-we-love-modular-contracting/ https://18f.gsa.gov/2019/04/09/why-we-love-modular-contracti...
code-faster 6y ago
Can't we setup a school Today that does R&D in open source tech and apply for research grants?
yalogin 6y ago
If anything it should be the law that all federal software should be open sourced. This is after all created with the people's money. Companies that write it get money to write it but should ultimately belong to the people. We all know its never going to happen though.
imglorp 6y ago
I think one piece in federal scope would be school courseware. How many poor schools fork out for something to do forums, grades, homework submission, lesson notes. There's a ton of duplication and there's no point. Get one decent cloud implementation, host it, and scale for several million users. Then give all schools and students free access. It's no-brainer infrastructure, like highways.
- throwawaygh 6y ago
  Moodle is GPL. The expensive part is training, not the license fees. Lots of teachers really need extreme amounts of hand-holding, even younger ones who have been using websites for their entire lives. (And you can replace "teacher" there with any other profession, including "programmer".)
  - warkdarrior 6y ago
    This is just an indication that the design and concepts of Moodle do not match the mental model commonly used by teachers.
    - marcosdumay 6y ago
      Let's call it clearly, all educational software is badly designed. Moodle is no exception. It's not only different from the teachers mental model, it's also different from the students mental models, and administrators mental models, besides it imposes complex and low productivity workflows. The newer proprietary educational portals are usually designed after Moodle, so it's not only bad, it's also trend setting. The good news is that this means they are better than the old ones from before people had something to copy.
      - jedbrown 6y ago
        I'm a professor. Our department has run its own Moodle for years, despite the university switching to Canvas. The university has exerted lots of pressure and this is the first semester in which all classes are primarily on Canvas. There has been no end to complaints about pedagogy that isn't expressible in Canvas, resulting in bad compromises or huge amounts of labor for large classes. Bottom line: if universities could contract for support and pay developers a fraction of what they currently pay for proprietary LMS, Moodle (or another open source platform currently starved for resources) would have much better usability and student data wouldn't be in the hands of private equity firms.
swlkr 6y ago
I'm biased seeing as I'm a software engineer, but this is actually a great idea. It could provide much needed competition to expensive gov contractors creating proprietary software.
untog 6y ago
The government should make open-source software, paying developers handsomely to do so. I know I live in cloud-cuckoo fantasy land here, but I know plenty of developers that would love to work on projects for the civic good, but they don't because they also want to earn good money so that they can live comfortably, raise a family easily, etc. etc. So they go and work for Facebook and Google, etc. There's an inbuilt assumption that government can't or shouldn't ever compete with tech giants for salary. But look at the incredible sums of money wasted on contracts with borderline useless consulting shops. You can't tell me that money wouldn't be better spent on hiring smart developers and project managers and just getting stuff done. I know it'll never happen, but a developer can dream. There's no actual reason why it couldn't.
- zapita 6y ago
  For what it’s worth I agree 100% with you.
- jeffbee 6y ago
  There are USDS and 18F, that were initially populated with ex-Googbooksoftlix engineers. Of course, everyone with a brain left USDS after Trump was elected. https://medium.com/the-u-s-digital-service/youll-never-be-the-same-again-dc5b16b84ba9 https://medium.com/the-u-s-digital-service/youll-never-be-th... https://www.fastcompany.com/40528581/obama-federal-it-fix-it-shop-18f-has-shrunk-by-more-than-half-under-trump https://www.fastcompany.com/40528581/obama-federal-it-fix-it...
- hanniabu 6y ago
  That's the ideal situation, but anybody that has worked in the public sector can tell you the outcome. You'd have an office full of incompetent people that are making $150k/yr just because they're a friend or relative of someone. That's a really big problem in government and there's no simple solution here. Even if you started doing background checks and not allowing partners/relatives of current employees to be hired, they would just get picked up as favors by other districts. A sort of friend hiring exchange program if you will.
  - untog 6y ago
tyler2 6y ago
This won't work. It will create another layer of grant writing bureaucrats that shovel the money towards their favorites and cash in on the process. Corporate money already has a bad influence on software freedom. This will be worse. What would work is UBI, so persons who are willing to live frugally for a couple of years can create software, no strings attached.
- DavyJones1983 6y ago
  Who would do this when a Software Engineer can get paid £400 a day working in the private sector and live well while saving money up for things like property or a new vehicle? That is before we get into the potential problems of UBI itself. Which there would be numerous.
bluedevil2k 6y ago
The government has shown time and again that it's terrible at investing. Most people/entities are when they're spending other people's money. This would result in the same issues as all government spending does - the powerful Reps and Senators will funnel money to open source projects in their districts and to their donors. We'll see a lot of open source projects in Kentucky get funded because of McConnell. Liberal & Democrat based projects will see little funding as Republicans block their funding. It would be a mess.
- sethish 6y ago
  Debatable. Venture capital in the technology market hasn't shown consistent return on investment in terms of revenue. Contrawise, the interstate system and the CCC were effective government investments.
Proven 6y ago
No, it shouldn't. It's a call for handouts for OSS.
AtlasBarfed 6y ago
I think this would backfire. The cash cow contracts will be viciously defended, and OSS will invariably be labelled "socialist" or "communist" (at it is socialist at a fundamental level). Essentially it will politicize it, probably to a degree it has not been publicly subjected to. And OSS has little to no professional PR to defend it, at least in relation to the vendors that will employ armies of PR flacks.
- Ericson2314 6y ago
  That might have been a problem 10-20 years ago, but I'm quite willing to take the risk and win big today. Remember we need something like this to counter the "breaking up FAANG is bad for national security" narrative.
dustingetz 6y ago
Why bother to build awesome free software that works when you can charge 8, 9, 10 figures and deliver nothing
nhkcode 6y ago
How does the licensing work? According to the GPL FAQ[1] code written by government employees is public domain and can't be licensed with the GPL. I'd imagine similar restrictions would apply to other copyleft licenses. [1] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLUSGov https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLUSGov
- thinkmassive 6y ago
  Most code written for government use is not written by government employees, but by contractors. Here's the second paragraph from the section you linked: "However, when a US federal government agency uses contractors to develop software, that is a different situation. The contract can require the contractor to release it under the GNU GPL. (GNU Ada was developed in this way.) Or the contract can assign the copyright to the government agency, which can then release the software under the GNU GPL."
throwawaygh 6y ago
> While some FOSS contributors are paid by their employer to contribute, most contributions to FOSS are made without direct compensation. Therefore, another option is to provide tax credits to the people who volunteer their free time to help create and maintain FOSS. A bill for such a credit has been introduced in the New York State Assembly every legislative session since 2009 but has never made it out of committee. If passed, this bill would provide a $200 tax credit for expenses related to FOSS development, which would help incentivize more individuals to contribute, likely leading to spillover benefits for the state of New York similar to those from the French procurement regulation. It's like Hacktoberfest, but instead of a free t-shirt it's $200.00 off your tax bill. What could possibly go wrong?
- easton 6y ago
  Hacktoberfest learned the lesson, just have the project agree to participate. (Or say that you only get the credit if the development was for a foundation, like Apache or Mozilla)
andi999 6y ago
I read once that software created out of public funded projects in the US was public domain, is this actually true?
danschumann 6y ago
Congress should write laws which are like open source software. Branches.. revisions.. being ran through a legal interpreter to ensure there are no logical errors. There is a movement for plain english bills, which the average user(citizen) could read. I'm for that too.
- ddingus 6y ago
  Can you imagine a parser from the near future? SB 1101 Legislation failed self consistency checks against: HB 1203, SB 32 Renders sections in statute redundant: 33.401, section A 31.22, section D Renders sections in statute moot: 31.101, all sections. 32.4, section B Gaps in enforcement found (loop holes) SB 1101 Section A, has incomplete coverage of peoples...
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    Just push it anyways, SB 32 is always flaky…
  - anticensor 6y ago
    Sections from other statutes that would make obeying this statute punishable: HB 7075
    - ddingus 6y ago
      Exactly!
- marcosdumay 6y ago
  > Branches.. revisions.. That's the normal law creation workflow (nearly everywhere, for a century or so already). They don't use automated tools, but the features are there.
- DavyJones1983 6y ago
  How would that work with Common Law? Life isn't software engineering where anyone can just contribute. I literally had a conversation today with someone that thought Common Law was "Christian Law" and then called me Dumb when I explained where that didn't really make any sense.
snarfy 6y ago
There is really no reason at all that any government database should be a commercial database. I'm looking squarely at you, Oracle.
tpoacher 6y ago
No, they should invest in FREE (libre) software. There is a difference.
diego_moita 6y ago
For a non-American, it is amusing to see Americans believing that their Congress are the people's servants. Unlike other developed democracies, the U.S. is a country where bribing the Congress is actually legalized, in the form of campaign donations. In fact, the main work of most congresspeople is to run after money to finance their next campaign. Therefore they will serve primarily the ones that pay them, not the ones that elect them. When open source bribes politicians then they'll pay attention.
- xrd 6y ago
  If I could donate all my karma points to you for this single comment, I would.
- Siira 6y ago
  As someone who doesn't live in the US, I should tell people here that legalizing "bad" actions can be a net good. The lobbying market is big, and you can't extinguish it; You can only make it a black market. This makes the laws more suited to the interests of "shady elites." Consider that Google serves the whole world a very valuable service; What do the corrupt beneficiaries of most other countries do? They have near zero output.
  - vlovich123 6y ago
    Yes and that doesn't mean that legalizing it carte blanche is a net good either. There are important pieces of legislation missing around controlling how and when politician's can fundraise. Most normal countries legalize lobbying & restrict electioneering to a ~3 month window prior to an election. Additionally, they usually line up election cycles so that you're only having an election every 4 years on all parts of government. America has no such restrictions. Members of Congress & the President start running & fundraising now ~2 years before an election (& unofficially before that). For the House of Representatives, that means members are in an electioneering & fundraising mode non-stop. The staggered election cycle in the Senate means that a large portion of the Senate is constantly campaigning further making focusing on the act of governing difficult. Fixing these issues doesn't solve all problems obviously but making no reforms isn't going to improve things either.
andromeduck 6y ago
Hope they don't copy any APIs for comparability because that'd be copyright infringement.
Ericson2314 6y ago
Europe is ahead of the curve here, wonder if anything they do influenced the Brookings institute to say this. > This research shows that the passage of such a law in France led to as much as an 18% increase in the founding of French IT-related startups and as much as a 14% increase in the number of French workers employed in IT-related jobs. Yes it did!
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
StillBored 6y ago
I think I'm going to disagree with the sentiment of the article and say that congress should not be investing in opensource generically any more than they should be building cars, computers, or whatever other shared technologies we all use (except maybe to boost some really fundamental research, AKA Sematech). But that isn't to say, that congress shouldn't be allocating budget to open source projects where it makes sense. Another poster pointed out the education software market, which is a good example of a case where the government is basically creating a whole industry that exists primary to service a government need. In that case there should be a strong bias to libre licensed software, even going so far as to create it if needed. Blanket statements though, about all software the government uses should be free is crazy. Why can't the government actually do cost/benefit analysis and make that determination on a case by case basis and pick the tool for the job. It would be crazy to say that they should write their own internet search engine, or niche software for the two guys in the government that use $commercial_off_the_shelf_package that only runs on windows. So, why not identify a few places that need change and fix those rather than these all encompassing statements. Tax filing software is another area where anyone who isn't h&r block or Intuit thinks the government should actually spend a few million and write some software, or for that matter voting software. PS, in case it wasn't clear, if the government writes some software is should absolutely be opensource with a liberal license.
otterley 6y ago
Don't we already do this via National Science Foundation (NSF) grants? A lot of open source has come out of them. If you look at academic papers associated with the source, you'll often see NSF grant numbers.
umutisik 6y ago
Also worth considering is open source software grants for academics. This would increase the number of people in academia who are major contributors to open source projects. Added benefit would be that, as practicing software engineers, those people would be good at teaching software engineering to their students.
- sitkack 6y ago
  I love this idea. There are already processes and procedures in place, it piggy backs on a lot of existing relationships. NSF?
jokull 6y ago
Big movement in Iceland on this. Ministry of Finance has multiple teams working in a shared codebase that is open on github, that is supposed to be a shared repository to aggregate the whole gov user experience in one place (island.is). Another example; I’m using an NLP library (Greynir) that was recently MIT licensed because of Icelandic government grants (was previously on a less liberal, but still open license). See https://github.com/island-is/island.is https://github.com/island-is/island.is
jqpabc123 6y ago
Asking for government support is really an admission of failure. It is an admission that the open source concept cannot survive on it's own merit in the marketplace. It is asking government to pick winners and losers by way of funding, instead of the marketplace. What could possibly go wrong? Everyone knows that government lives on the cutting edge of technology and will always respond instantly to the open source community --- rather than say corporate donors and lobbyists. They would never demand things be steered in their direction. As they say, be careful what you wish for --- you just might get it.
- elicash 6y ago
  Lots of things couldn't survive on their own, but aren't failures at all. For example, we're currently subsidizing multiple vaccines for COVID-19 because it's important that we collectively take on the risk that a single one might fail. Those billions in spending to pay for something that might be worth $0 is worth it because it's likely at least some of the vaccines will be safe and effective. Sometimes things start out as unprofitable and then only later, because of those dollars invested, become profitable. Space, for example. Government investments in solar power have also been super important. Or, more relevant to Hacker News, how about ARPANET being funded by the military, and then later that funding going to the National Science Foundation? Eventually, of course, it got privatized.
  - jqpabc123 6y ago
    COVID-19 is a national emergency, open source is not. Vaccines easily survive on their own merit in the marketplace. Government funding is being used to speed up the process and insure redundancy in case of failure. ARPANET is another questionable comparison. A world wide, failure proof network had never been done at the time so the military subsidized the basic research and development. Once the basic R&D was done, the funding ended. I would be inclined to support new, innovative R&D but I am not willing to pay taxes simply to clone existing commercial software.
    - elicash 6y ago
oxymoran 6y ago
Congress would have to know what open source software was first. Also the problem that Congress is in the pockets of these tech monoliths.
KoftaBob 6y ago
The federal government has ramped up that exact goal with the launch of the US Digital Service: https://www.usds.gov/ https://www.usds.gov/ https://digital.gov/ https://digital.gov/
Communitivity 6y ago
A huge move would be to standardize on Mastodon instead of Teams, and invest in making Mastodon secure enough for FOUO work.
- duskwuff 6y ago
  Huh? Microsoft Teams is a centralized real-time text/video chat service, not a federated microblogging service like Mastodon. They aren't even remotely similar.
mixmastamyk 6y ago
Indeed, I once did some work for the Library of Congress. Despite all of it being developed and served on Linux, I was forced to boot a Windows VM to connect to their VPN and work through it. Who's the "cancer" now?
nickpinkston 6y ago
This is the infrastructure investment I'm about! I want to see Biden / Congress cutting the ribbon on a datacenter, quantum computing lab, or something.
mensetmanusman 6y ago
This is an interesting point. If congress invests in open source, it subsidizes all software development for the world. If congress invests in software from companies (like MS or Amazon), it subsidizes software development for these U.S. companies to compete on the global stage. I can see the first case being in the best interest of humanity, and the second case being in the best interest of the U.S. What would you do?
- visarga 6y ago
  "These U.S. companies" are not the U.S., they have international shareholders and employees. The rest of U.S. would benefit from better open source just like the rest of the world, especially now that so much of the technology stack relies on it.
lmeyerov 6y ago
I've been a proponent of something here for awhile. For context, currently, gov requires something like 1% of budget to go to 'small' business (where small is < 500 employees!). Doing 1% to OSS would be huge, and get around the problem of NSF/NIH/etc. having to fund novel research but largely failing at common data infra. The main sticking point I struggled with here is around beltway contractors. They already largely prevent good software from making it into gov. Today, they prefer to write their own crap or live on OSS without really giving back. Most proposals I thought about here would result in beltway bandits getting the OSS contracts without doing real passthrough to the actual devs. They're the ones with the contract relationships and can tell funders their OSS value-add layer is the part needing funding to make it gov-ready. Most folks in this community are nice as individuals, but due to the lengthy & uphill nature of pushing a contract through, they've locked down the system, and it'd take a tight policy & strong org to work around them. I'm not a fan of Linux Foundation, Apache, etc. as financial stewards either, so it's tough.
- infinite8s 6y ago
  Isn't this lock-in partly what the US Digital Services was meant to overcome?
WalterBright 6y ago
The open source software community is doing just fine. Having the government step in will likely change its nature, and not for the better.
- cryptica 6y ago
  As the author of a moderately popular open source project, I have to agree. Whenever the government intervenes, they tend to distort markets and cause a huge amount of suffering. They will end up funding low quality competing projects which will harm my project by using money and media coverage to steal attention. That's basically the story of my career. The government, working with corporations have been ruining my career so far. I would be much better off if VCs and governments had stayed out of our industry entirely.
  - WalterBright 6y ago
    Government funding will always come with strings attached. Whoever pays the bill calls the tune.
thwllms 6y ago
This would be a very big deal in my industry - civil/environmental engineering. In the river/stream flood modeling space, the US Army Corps of Engineers' HEC-RAS program [1] is king. It's a critical part of FEMA's National Flood Insurance Program. HEC-RAS is free, but it's not open source, and USACE doesn't appear to have any plans to make it so. HEC-RAS is a Windows-only GUI application. Supposedly USACE has an internal Linux version, not publicly available. HEC-RAS has a limited COM API, but it's not officially documented. I suspect that the API was exposed unintentionally. Most of the input files are text, but the format is very strange (very old-school), again with no official documentation. I spend much of my days reverse-engineering HEC-RAS file formats in order to make the process of building flood models more efficient and less error-prone. Other developers like me exist at competing civil engineering firms, working on similar reverse engineering projects and secret sauce tools for HEC-RAS. If HEC-RAS was made open source, it would be a game changer. We'd be able to accomplish so much more. If the input/output files were officially documented, it would be a game changer. FEMA would benefit tremendously. [1] https://www.hec.usace.army.mil/software/hec-ras/ https://www.hec.usace.army.mil/software/hec-ras/
- boris-ning-usds 6y ago
  Hi, I sent an email to the team in the listing to see if they can provide additional information about the file formats involved in HEC-RAS. Finger-crossed. The following link does include a Linux download, but with little support - https://www.hec.usace.army.mil/software/hec-ras/download.aspx https://www.hec.usace.army.mil/software/hec-ras/download.asp.... Also doing some digging on Github, I did find an reverse engineered version of a python version of RAS via win32com control - https://github.com/mikebannis/rascontrol https://github.com/mikebannis/rascontrol, there's also projects of varying degree across Github - https://github.com/search?q=hec-ras https://github.com/search?q=hec-ras.
  - thwllms 6y ago
    Based on your username, you're at US Digital Service? Thanks so much for taking to time to reach out. Glad to see they released a Linux version of the rasUnsteady64 executable! I was able to run the example on WSL! It wasn't there the last time I looked, for sure. There's a lot more to HEC-RAS than that, but it's certainly the most important component. Mike Bannis has done great work wrapping the HEC-RAS controller and creating parsers some of the file formats. There's a very helpful _unoffcial_ book [1] laying out the win32com control and file format details. Making HEC-RAS open source would allow many more projects like these, with significantly less guesswork. [1] https://www.kleinschmidtgroup.com/breaking-the-hec-ras-code-2/ https://www.kleinschmidtgroup.com/breaking-the-hec-ras-code-...
nine_k 6y ago
I would suggest that the government does not directly fund existing OSS development, unless it's using said OSS and wants to buy development of a particular feature I would suggest that the government reimbursed 80% of small contributions, e.g. below $300 a year per project, and matched larger contributions, e.g. up to $3000 a year per project. As always, when an influx of free money is involved, cunning criminals would try to siphon it out without producing useful software. This is why I would limit such contributions to small amount per individual contributor. It makes really easy for a large enough group of fans fund a popular project for free, and double their larger contributions, without the government choosing the projects. It also would still require spending money, or just effort, to donate, so donating just for kicks is limited.
SkyMarshal 6y ago
Fwiw DARPA is already investing in FOSS: https://www.darpa.mil/program/posh-open-source-hardware https://www.darpa.mil/program/posh-open-source-hardware https://www.darpa.mil/opencatalog https://www.darpa.mil/opencatalog
autocorr 6y ago
I think we should have an National Science Foundation level federal institution for free software. Stallman advocated for this early on I think. The NSF funds fundamental research to the benefit of all (setting aside the issue of pay-walled journals...). Anyone can apply for a grant to fund research, and in fact this is how "soft money" researchers who are not tenure-track professors fund their salaries. Using the academic community as an anchor for a free software equivalent to the NSF would also solve the problem that academics have no incentive to develop or maintain software.
deleted 6y ago
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vmception 6y ago
I've been saying that too, especially for the crypto space. Everyone just has an incoherent mix of gaslighting regarding everything that went wrong, and inadequate regulation. Governments can be helping contribute to industry standards, the protocols, the smart contracts that would help some industries function more seamlessly. A state-contributed escrow smart contract would basically fix the escrow industry. A backdoor in it would be laughed at hilariously within a day. This would be a more collaborative role of the state and propel things forward much faster.
adultSwim 6y ago
What I hear: "Congress should further subsidize the technology industries"
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
known 6y ago
IMO Closed source enhances Productivity; Open source Empowers and enhances Productivity;

692 points by gilad 6y ago

I don't have hard statistics to back this up, but my impression is that Congress has a habit of adding strings and restrictions on whatever they fund. I would hesitate to accept that Faustian bargain.

eximius 6y ago
Accessibility would probably be the biggest difficulty that might be legally required through poorly interacting laws. (Not to say that things shouldn't be accessible, but we've already seen good-will gestures ruined because of this case. Some university posts lectures online to be nice, forced to take them down because they aren't accessible.)
- mtalantikite 6y ago
  The federal government has a requirement by law (called Section 508) that requires agencies to provide people with disabilities equal access to electronic information and data. Agencies have teams whose sole job is to evaluate any software that is built or deployed meets accessibility standards.
- tehjoker 6y ago
  If they're giving you money, you have the space and ability to do it. I don't see the problem here.
  - eximius 6y ago
    I think you're drastically overestimating how much money would be available per project and underestimating the cost of accessibility.
    - tehjoker 6y ago
      In theory, such a mandate can be adequately resourced and the institution providing the funding clearly has such funds.

R0b0t1 6y ago

This sounds good as a soundbite, but how? Knowing how federal bidding works in general I can't imagine the funds being used constructively, it would end up as some kind of popularity contest.

dTal 6y ago
Is that any different than any other "government funds X" proposal? If this is a consistent problem, then government is just plain broken. Which is of course a problem, but an orthogonal one to software funding specifically.
johnmaguire2013 6y ago
The article mentions three ideas for how: > All three of these levers for FOSS—direct funding, procurement regulation, and tax incentives—should be included in the next infrastructure bill.
ebiester 6y ago
You could run it like NSF grants. https://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_list.jsp?org=nsf&ord=rcnt https://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_list.jsp?org=nsf&ord=rcnt Put 10 million a year for 5 years as an experiment. It takes an extra administrator and some part time experts in the field who are compensated for the work.
- sitkack 6y ago
  Or SBIR for OSS? https://www.sbir.gov/ https://www.sbir.gov/
robertlagrant 6y ago
Money will likely to go those who employ people who are good at writing convincing grant applications. 'Twas ever thus.
sidlls 6y ago
FOSS is already to some extent a popularity contest.

alexgmcm 6y ago

If it's paid for by the people, it should belong to the people. Open-source meets this requirement, proprietary software doesn't.

jburwell 6y ago
Unless the software is classified, the source code is available via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.
- Dangeranger 6y ago
  One problem with this approach is that you need to know about the existence of the software in order to craft a FOIA request such that you can see the code, this can mean sending multiple FOIA requests. Combine that with the delay in fulfilling a request, on the order of months, or sometimes longer, and you could be looking at a year or more before you get the source code you were looking for.
- adrianN 6y ago
  What's the license for code obtained that way? Is it public domain?
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    Government work in general is in the public domain.
    - dwheeler 6y ago
      Work done by US government employees as part of their official duties is in general not under copyright within the US. But that is a much narrower statement. Most software developed using government funds is not exclusively developed by government employees as part of their official duties. Most Government funding of software development goes to contractors, where that rule does not apply. The no copyright only applies to the US, not necessarily outside. Outside the US it definitely can have a copyright. There are also some weird exceptions for government employees, specifically for the u.s. postal service and for certain materials created by NIST.

dimmke 6y ago

For what it's worth, there is a lot of movement in the Federal government to open source code that is written for the government. The GSA, which is the kind of meta agency that helps other federal agencies do stuff talks a lot about this. They also have a site called https://code.gov/ https://code.gov/ that lists open source projects created for the Federal government. A lot of their own repositories are completely open source and they do development in the open. I work on a contract for the CDC and we open sourced an older version of the software we display data on maps in: https://github.com/CDCgov/CDC-Maps https://github.com/CDCgov/CDC-Maps I'm working on switching our development to open so we use the same codebase that is available to everybody and adding other visualizations. It's slow going but there is movement there. I do agree it would be beneficial to fund open source projects, likely by including some requirement in contracts. I think them funding projects directly with cash could cause a lot of problems though. The increase regulations that would need to be added would probably not be worth it for open source projects. People who get funding would likely need to submit a lot of documentation, there'd also probably be weird rules about non U.S. citizens etc... and laws would need to be passed.

jhardy54 6y ago
Big +1. I found a small bug in a GSA site (plainlanguage.gov) and was able to PR a fix that was merged almost immediately. It's a shame that we can't do the same with all of the bugs in other government websites.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
mtalantikite 6y ago
It's definitely becoming more common. Many agencies have organizations up on GitHub where development of various products are done out in the open (for example, https://github.com/cmsgov https://github.com/cmsgov).
toomuchtodo 6y ago
> I think them funding projects directly with cash could cause a lot of problems though. The increase regulations that would need to be added would probably not be worth it for open source projects. People who get funding would likely need to submit a lot of documentation, there'd also probably be weird rules about non U.S. citizens etc... and laws would need to be passed. I think 18F's modular contracting methodology is highly effective for this sort endeavor, if you can take the opinion that they're the sponsor and benevolent dictator driving that part of the codebase (and the code developed is open sourced upon confirmation acceptance criteria has been met). Thank you for switching to an open development model. A rising tide lifts all boats. https://18f.gsa.gov/2019/04/09/why-we-love-modular-contracting/ https://18f.gsa.gov/2019/04/09/why-we-love-modular-contracti...

code-faster 6y ago

Can't we setup a school Today that does R&D in open source tech and apply for research grants?

yalogin 6y ago

If anything it should be the law that all federal software should be open sourced. This is after all created with the people's money. Companies that write it get money to write it but should ultimately belong to the people. We all know its never going to happen though.

imglorp 6y ago

I think one piece in federal scope would be school courseware. How many poor schools fork out for something to do forums, grades, homework submission, lesson notes. There's a ton of duplication and there's no point. Get one decent cloud implementation, host it, and scale for several million users. Then give all schools and students free access. It's no-brainer infrastructure, like highways.

throwawaygh 6y ago
Moodle is GPL. The expensive part is training, not the license fees. Lots of teachers really need extreme amounts of hand-holding, even younger ones who have been using websites for their entire lives. (And you can replace "teacher" there with any other profession, including "programmer".)
- warkdarrior 6y ago
  This is just an indication that the design and concepts of Moodle do not match the mental model commonly used by teachers.
  - marcosdumay 6y ago
    Let's call it clearly, all educational software is badly designed. Moodle is no exception. It's not only different from the teachers mental model, it's also different from the students mental models, and administrators mental models, besides it imposes complex and low productivity workflows. The newer proprietary educational portals are usually designed after Moodle, so it's not only bad, it's also trend setting. The good news is that this means they are better than the old ones from before people had something to copy.
    - jedbrown 6y ago
      I'm a professor. Our department has run its own Moodle for years, despite the university switching to Canvas. The university has exerted lots of pressure and this is the first semester in which all classes are primarily on Canvas. There has been no end to complaints about pedagogy that isn't expressible in Canvas, resulting in bad compromises or huge amounts of labor for large classes. Bottom line: if universities could contract for support and pay developers a fraction of what they currently pay for proprietary LMS, Moodle (or another open source platform currently starved for resources) would have much better usability and student data wouldn't be in the hands of private equity firms.

swlkr 6y ago

I'm biased seeing as I'm a software engineer, but this is actually a great idea. It could provide much needed competition to expensive gov contractors creating proprietary software.

untog 6y ago

The government should make open-source software, paying developers handsomely to do so. I know I live in cloud-cuckoo fantasy land here, but I know plenty of developers that would love to work on projects for the civic good, but they don't because they also want to earn good money so that they can live comfortably, raise a family easily, etc. etc. So they go and work for Facebook and Google, etc. There's an inbuilt assumption that government can't or shouldn't ever compete with tech giants for salary. But look at the incredible sums of money wasted on contracts with borderline useless consulting shops. You can't tell me that money wouldn't be better spent on hiring smart developers and project managers and just getting stuff done. I know it'll never happen, but a developer can dream. There's no actual reason why it couldn't.

zapita 6y ago
For what it’s worth I agree 100% with you.
jeffbee 6y ago
There are USDS and 18F, that were initially populated with ex-Googbooksoftlix engineers. Of course, everyone with a brain left USDS after Trump was elected. https://medium.com/the-u-s-digital-service/youll-never-be-the-same-again-dc5b16b84ba9 https://medium.com/the-u-s-digital-service/youll-never-be-th... https://www.fastcompany.com/40528581/obama-federal-it-fix-it-shop-18f-has-shrunk-by-more-than-half-under-trump https://www.fastcompany.com/40528581/obama-federal-it-fix-it...
hanniabu 6y ago
That's the ideal situation, but anybody that has worked in the public sector can tell you the outcome. You'd have an office full of incompetent people that are making $150k/yr just because they're a friend or relative of someone. That's a really big problem in government and there's no simple solution here. Even if you started doing background checks and not allowing partners/relatives of current employees to be hired, they would just get picked up as favors by other districts. A sort of friend hiring exchange program if you will.
- untog 6y ago

tyler2 6y ago

This won't work. It will create another layer of grant writing bureaucrats that shovel the money towards their favorites and cash in on the process. Corporate money already has a bad influence on software freedom. This will be worse. What would work is UBI, so persons who are willing to live frugally for a couple of years can create software, no strings attached.

DavyJones1983 6y ago
Who would do this when a Software Engineer can get paid £400 a day working in the private sector and live well while saving money up for things like property or a new vehicle? That is before we get into the potential problems of UBI itself. Which there would be numerous.

bluedevil2k 6y ago

The government has shown time and again that it's terrible at investing. Most people/entities are when they're spending other people's money. This would result in the same issues as all government spending does - the powerful Reps and Senators will funnel money to open source projects in their districts and to their donors. We'll see a lot of open source projects in Kentucky get funded because of McConnell. Liberal & Democrat based projects will see little funding as Republicans block their funding. It would be a mess.

sethish 6y ago
Debatable. Venture capital in the technology market hasn't shown consistent return on investment in terms of revenue. Contrawise, the interstate system and the CCC were effective government investments.

Proven 6y ago

No, it shouldn't. It's a call for handouts for OSS.

AtlasBarfed 6y ago

I think this would backfire. The cash cow contracts will be viciously defended, and OSS will invariably be labelled "socialist" or "communist" (at it is socialist at a fundamental level). Essentially it will politicize it, probably to a degree it has not been publicly subjected to. And OSS has little to no professional PR to defend it, at least in relation to the vendors that will employ armies of PR flacks.

Ericson2314 6y ago
That might have been a problem 10-20 years ago, but I'm quite willing to take the risk and win big today. Remember we need something like this to counter the "breaking up FAANG is bad for national security" narrative.

dustingetz 6y ago

Why bother to build awesome free software that works when you can charge 8, 9, 10 figures and deliver nothing

nhkcode 6y ago

How does the licensing work? According to the GPL FAQ[1] code written by government employees is public domain and can't be licensed with the GPL. I'd imagine similar restrictions would apply to other copyleft licenses. [1] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLUSGov https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLUSGov

thinkmassive 6y ago
Most code written for government use is not written by government employees, but by contractors. Here's the second paragraph from the section you linked: "However, when a US federal government agency uses contractors to develop software, that is a different situation. The contract can require the contractor to release it under the GNU GPL. (GNU Ada was developed in this way.) Or the contract can assign the copyright to the government agency, which can then release the software under the GNU GPL."

throwawaygh 6y ago

> While some FOSS contributors are paid by their employer to contribute, most contributions to FOSS are made without direct compensation. Therefore, another option is to provide tax credits to the people who volunteer their free time to help create and maintain FOSS. A bill for such a credit has been introduced in the New York State Assembly every legislative session since 2009 but has never made it out of committee. If passed, this bill would provide a $200 tax credit for expenses related to FOSS development, which would help incentivize more individuals to contribute, likely leading to spillover benefits for the state of New York similar to those from the French procurement regulation. It's like Hacktoberfest, but instead of a free t-shirt it's $200.00 off your tax bill. What could possibly go wrong?

easton 6y ago
Hacktoberfest learned the lesson, just have the project agree to participate. (Or say that you only get the credit if the development was for a foundation, like Apache or Mozilla)

andi999 6y ago

I read once that software created out of public funded projects in the US was public domain, is this actually true?

danschumann 6y ago

Congress should write laws which are like open source software. Branches.. revisions.. being ran through a legal interpreter to ensure there are no logical errors. There is a movement for plain english bills, which the average user(citizen) could read. I'm for that too.

ddingus 6y ago
Can you imagine a parser from the near future? SB 1101 Legislation failed self consistency checks against: HB 1203, SB 32 Renders sections in statute redundant: 33.401, section A 31.22, section D Renders sections in statute moot: 31.101, all sections. 32.4, section B Gaps in enforcement found (loop holes) SB 1101 Section A, has incomplete coverage of peoples...
- saagarjha 6y ago
  Just push it anyways, SB 32 is always flaky…
- anticensor 6y ago
  Sections from other statutes that would make obeying this statute punishable: HB 7075
  - ddingus 6y ago
    Exactly!
marcosdumay 6y ago
> Branches.. revisions.. That's the normal law creation workflow (nearly everywhere, for a century or so already). They don't use automated tools, but the features are there.
DavyJones1983 6y ago
How would that work with Common Law? Life isn't software engineering where anyone can just contribute. I literally had a conversation today with someone that thought Common Law was "Christian Law" and then called me Dumb when I explained where that didn't really make any sense.

snarfy 6y ago

There is really no reason at all that any government database should be a commercial database. I'm looking squarely at you, Oracle.

tpoacher 6y ago

No, they should invest in FREE (libre) software. There is a difference.

diego_moita 6y ago

For a non-American, it is amusing to see Americans believing that their Congress are the people's servants. Unlike other developed democracies, the U.S. is a country where bribing the Congress is actually legalized, in the form of campaign donations. In fact, the main work of most congresspeople is to run after money to finance their next campaign. Therefore they will serve primarily the ones that pay them, not the ones that elect them. When open source bribes politicians then they'll pay attention.

xrd 6y ago
If I could donate all my karma points to you for this single comment, I would.
Siira 6y ago
As someone who doesn't live in the US, I should tell people here that legalizing "bad" actions can be a net good. The lobbying market is big, and you can't extinguish it; You can only make it a black market. This makes the laws more suited to the interests of "shady elites." Consider that Google serves the whole world a very valuable service; What do the corrupt beneficiaries of most other countries do? They have near zero output.
- vlovich123 6y ago
  Yes and that doesn't mean that legalizing it carte blanche is a net good either. There are important pieces of legislation missing around controlling how and when politician's can fundraise. Most normal countries legalize lobbying & restrict electioneering to a ~3 month window prior to an election. Additionally, they usually line up election cycles so that you're only having an election every 4 years on all parts of government. America has no such restrictions. Members of Congress & the President start running & fundraising now ~2 years before an election (& unofficially before that). For the House of Representatives, that means members are in an electioneering & fundraising mode non-stop. The staggered election cycle in the Senate means that a large portion of the Senate is constantly campaigning further making focusing on the act of governing difficult. Fixing these issues doesn't solve all problems obviously but making no reforms isn't going to improve things either.

andromeduck 6y ago

Hope they don't copy any APIs for comparability because that'd be copyright infringement.

Ericson2314 6y ago

Europe is ahead of the curve here, wonder if anything they do influenced the Brookings institute to say this. > This research shows that the passage of such a law in France led to as much as an 18% increase in the founding of French IT-related startups and as much as a 14% increase in the number of French workers employed in IT-related jobs. Yes it did!

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

StillBored 6y ago

I think I'm going to disagree with the sentiment of the article and say that congress should not be investing in opensource generically any more than they should be building cars, computers, or whatever other shared technologies we all use (except maybe to boost some really fundamental research, AKA Sematech). But that isn't to say, that congress shouldn't be allocating budget to open source projects where it makes sense. Another poster pointed out the education software market, which is a good example of a case where the government is basically creating a whole industry that exists primary to service a government need. In that case there should be a strong bias to libre licensed software, even going so far as to create it if needed. Blanket statements though, about all software the government uses should be free is crazy. Why can't the government actually do cost/benefit analysis and make that determination on a case by case basis and pick the tool for the job. It would be crazy to say that they should write their own internet search engine, or niche software for the two guys in the government that use $commercial_off_the_shelf_package that only runs on windows. So, why not identify a few places that need change and fix those rather than these all encompassing statements. Tax filing software is another area where anyone who isn't h&r block or Intuit thinks the government should actually spend a few million and write some software, or for that matter voting software. PS, in case it wasn't clear, if the government writes some software is should absolutely be opensource with a liberal license.

otterley 6y ago

Don't we already do this via National Science Foundation (NSF) grants? A lot of open source has come out of them. If you look at academic papers associated with the source, you'll often see NSF grant numbers.

umutisik 6y ago

Also worth considering is open source software grants for academics. This would increase the number of people in academia who are major contributors to open source projects. Added benefit would be that, as practicing software engineers, those people would be good at teaching software engineering to their students.

sitkack 6y ago
I love this idea. There are already processes and procedures in place, it piggy backs on a lot of existing relationships. NSF?

jokull 6y ago

Big movement in Iceland on this. Ministry of Finance has multiple teams working in a shared codebase that is open on github, that is supposed to be a shared repository to aggregate the whole gov user experience in one place (island.is). Another example; I’m using an NLP library (Greynir) that was recently MIT licensed because of Icelandic government grants (was previously on a less liberal, but still open license). See https://github.com/island-is/island.is https://github.com/island-is/island.is

jqpabc123 6y ago

Asking for government support is really an admission of failure. It is an admission that the open source concept cannot survive on it's own merit in the marketplace. It is asking government to pick winners and losers by way of funding, instead of the marketplace. What could possibly go wrong? Everyone knows that government lives on the cutting edge of technology and will always respond instantly to the open source community --- rather than say corporate donors and lobbyists. They would never demand things be steered in their direction. As they say, be careful what you wish for --- you just might get it.

elicash 6y ago
Lots of things couldn't survive on their own, but aren't failures at all. For example, we're currently subsidizing multiple vaccines for COVID-19 because it's important that we collectively take on the risk that a single one might fail. Those billions in spending to pay for something that might be worth $0 is worth it because it's likely at least some of the vaccines will be safe and effective. Sometimes things start out as unprofitable and then only later, because of those dollars invested, become profitable. Space, for example. Government investments in solar power have also been super important. Or, more relevant to Hacker News, how about ARPANET being funded by the military, and then later that funding going to the National Science Foundation? Eventually, of course, it got privatized.
- jqpabc123 6y ago
  COVID-19 is a national emergency, open source is not. Vaccines easily survive on their own merit in the marketplace. Government funding is being used to speed up the process and insure redundancy in case of failure. ARPANET is another questionable comparison. A world wide, failure proof network had never been done at the time so the military subsidized the basic research and development. Once the basic R&D was done, the funding ended. I would be inclined to support new, innovative R&D but I am not willing to pay taxes simply to clone existing commercial software.
  - elicash 6y ago

oxymoran 6y ago

Congress would have to know what open source software was first. Also the problem that Congress is in the pockets of these tech monoliths.

KoftaBob 6y ago

The federal government has ramped up that exact goal with the launch of the US Digital Service: https://www.usds.gov/ https://www.usds.gov/ https://digital.gov/ https://digital.gov/

Communitivity 6y ago

A huge move would be to standardize on Mastodon instead of Teams, and invest in making Mastodon secure enough for FOUO work.

duskwuff 6y ago
Huh? Microsoft Teams is a centralized real-time text/video chat service, not a federated microblogging service like Mastodon. They aren't even remotely similar.

mixmastamyk 6y ago

Indeed, I once did some work for the Library of Congress. Despite all of it being developed and served on Linux, I was forced to boot a Windows VM to connect to their VPN and work through it. Who's the "cancer" now?

nickpinkston 6y ago

This is the infrastructure investment I'm about! I want to see Biden / Congress cutting the ribbon on a datacenter, quantum computing lab, or something.

mensetmanusman 6y ago

This is an interesting point. If congress invests in open source, it subsidizes all software development for the world. If congress invests in software from companies (like MS or Amazon), it subsidizes software development for these U.S. companies to compete on the global stage. I can see the first case being in the best interest of humanity, and the second case being in the best interest of the U.S. What would you do?

visarga 6y ago
"These U.S. companies" are not the U.S., they have international shareholders and employees. The rest of U.S. would benefit from better open source just like the rest of the world, especially now that so much of the technology stack relies on it.

lmeyerov 6y ago

I've been a proponent of something here for awhile. For context, currently, gov requires something like 1% of budget to go to 'small' business (where small is < 500 employees!). Doing 1% to OSS would be huge, and get around the problem of NSF/NIH/etc. having to fund novel research but largely failing at common data infra. The main sticking point I struggled with here is around beltway contractors. They already largely prevent good software from making it into gov. Today, they prefer to write their own crap or live on OSS without really giving back. Most proposals I thought about here would result in beltway bandits getting the OSS contracts without doing real passthrough to the actual devs. They're the ones with the contract relationships and can tell funders their OSS value-add layer is the part needing funding to make it gov-ready. Most folks in this community are nice as individuals, but due to the lengthy & uphill nature of pushing a contract through, they've locked down the system, and it'd take a tight policy & strong org to work around them. I'm not a fan of Linux Foundation, Apache, etc. as financial stewards either, so it's tough.

infinite8s 6y ago
Isn't this lock-in partly what the US Digital Services was meant to overcome?

WalterBright 6y ago

The open source software community is doing just fine. Having the government step in will likely change its nature, and not for the better.

cryptica 6y ago
As the author of a moderately popular open source project, I have to agree. Whenever the government intervenes, they tend to distort markets and cause a huge amount of suffering. They will end up funding low quality competing projects which will harm my project by using money and media coverage to steal attention. That's basically the story of my career. The government, working with corporations have been ruining my career so far. I would be much better off if VCs and governments had stayed out of our industry entirely.
- WalterBright 6y ago
  Government funding will always come with strings attached. Whoever pays the bill calls the tune.

thwllms 6y ago

This would be a very big deal in my industry - civil/environmental engineering. In the river/stream flood modeling space, the US Army Corps of Engineers' HEC-RAS program [1] is king. It's a critical part of FEMA's National Flood Insurance Program. HEC-RAS is free, but it's not open source, and USACE doesn't appear to have any plans to make it so. HEC-RAS is a Windows-only GUI application. Supposedly USACE has an internal Linux version, not publicly available. HEC-RAS has a limited COM API, but it's not officially documented. I suspect that the API was exposed unintentionally. Most of the input files are text, but the format is very strange (very old-school), again with no official documentation. I spend much of my days reverse-engineering HEC-RAS file formats in order to make the process of building flood models more efficient and less error-prone. Other developers like me exist at competing civil engineering firms, working on similar reverse engineering projects and secret sauce tools for HEC-RAS. If HEC-RAS was made open source, it would be a game changer. We'd be able to accomplish so much more. If the input/output files were officially documented, it would be a game changer. FEMA would benefit tremendously. [1] https://www.hec.usace.army.mil/software/hec-ras/ https://www.hec.usace.army.mil/software/hec-ras/

boris-ning-usds 6y ago
Hi, I sent an email to the team in the listing to see if they can provide additional information about the file formats involved in HEC-RAS. Finger-crossed. The following link does include a Linux download, but with little support - https://www.hec.usace.army.mil/software/hec-ras/download.aspx https://www.hec.usace.army.mil/software/hec-ras/download.asp.... Also doing some digging on Github, I did find an reverse engineered version of a python version of RAS via win32com control - https://github.com/mikebannis/rascontrol https://github.com/mikebannis/rascontrol, there's also projects of varying degree across Github - https://github.com/search?q=hec-ras https://github.com/search?q=hec-ras.
- thwllms 6y ago
  Based on your username, you're at US Digital Service? Thanks so much for taking to time to reach out. Glad to see they released a Linux version of the rasUnsteady64 executable! I was able to run the example on WSL! It wasn't there the last time I looked, for sure. There's a lot more to HEC-RAS than that, but it's certainly the most important component. Mike Bannis has done great work wrapping the HEC-RAS controller and creating parsers some of the file formats. There's a very helpful _unoffcial_ book [1] laying out the win32com control and file format details. Making HEC-RAS open source would allow many more projects like these, with significantly less guesswork. [1] https://www.kleinschmidtgroup.com/breaking-the-hec-ras-code-2/ https://www.kleinschmidtgroup.com/breaking-the-hec-ras-code-...

nine_k 6y ago

I would suggest that the government does not directly fund existing OSS development, unless it's using said OSS and wants to buy development of a particular feature I would suggest that the government reimbursed 80% of small contributions, e.g. below $300 a year per project, and matched larger contributions, e.g. up to $3000 a year per project. As always, when an influx of free money is involved, cunning criminals would try to siphon it out without producing useful software. This is why I would limit such contributions to small amount per individual contributor. It makes really easy for a large enough group of fans fund a popular project for free, and double their larger contributions, without the government choosing the projects. It also would still require spending money, or just effort, to donate, so donating just for kicks is limited.

SkyMarshal 6y ago

Fwiw DARPA is already investing in FOSS: https://www.darpa.mil/program/posh-open-source-hardware https://www.darpa.mil/program/posh-open-source-hardware https://www.darpa.mil/opencatalog https://www.darpa.mil/opencatalog

autocorr 6y ago

I think we should have an National Science Foundation level federal institution for free software. Stallman advocated for this early on I think. The NSF funds fundamental research to the benefit of all (setting aside the issue of pay-walled journals...). Anyone can apply for a grant to fund research, and in fact this is how "soft money" researchers who are not tenure-track professors fund their salaries. Using the academic community as an anchor for a free software equivalent to the NSF would also solve the problem that academics have no incentive to develop or maintain software.

deleted 6y ago

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vmception 6y ago

I've been saying that too, especially for the crypto space. Everyone just has an incoherent mix of gaslighting regarding everything that went wrong, and inadequate regulation. Governments can be helping contribute to industry standards, the protocols, the smart contracts that would help some industries function more seamlessly. A state-contributed escrow smart contract would basically fix the escrow industry. A backdoor in it would be laughed at hilariously within a day. This would be a more collaborative role of the state and propel things forward much faster.

adultSwim 6y ago

What I hear: "Congress should further subsidize the technology industries"

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known 6y ago

IMO Closed source enhances Productivity; Open source Empowers and enhances Productivity;