15 ms·

Public Money, Public Code

639 points by modinfo 4y ago

dusted 4y ago
Wow, nice one, Facebook! I'm trying to share the link, and I get: "Posts that look like spam according to our Community Guidelines are blocked on Facebook and can't be edited."
- yboris 4y ago
  Confirming - I'm unable to post to my Facebook wall!
Maxburn 4y ago
If I was the software developer forced into this I'd just raise my price knowing I can no longer sell it elsewhere, IF I even agreed to it. That's going to hurt tax payers. It's a catchy title but just doesn't take more than a moments thought to see how it's going to backfire.
- postalrat 4y ago
  What do you mean? If you are a software developer working for a state or city you expect to sell the software you develop for them and collect the money yourself?
  - Maxburn 4y ago
    Good point, I was only thinking about outside contractors.
    - postalrat 4y ago
      Contractors are no different. Typically you don't get to sell the software someone else paid for. If you want to sell it then develop it on your own.
      - WaitWaitWha 4y ago
        Right, and I am all for that to remain. This reads way broader, as you describe it "develop it on your own", but can sell it only once to public sector.
  - WaitWaitWha 4y ago
    If I develop software specific to the public sector and sell it to the government, it is "publicly financed software developed for the public sector". What is my incentive to develop any software at all for public sector, since potential client no. 2 will just take the code that I released? The ask does not state employed by... it just says: “Implement legislation requiring that publicly financed software developed for the public sector be made publicly available under a Free and Open Source Software licence.” I would be fine with “Implement legislation requiring that publicly financed software developed by employees of public sector, for the public sector be made publicly available under a Free and Open Source Software licence.”
    - postalrat 4y ago
      Your incentive is that you are being paid.
      - WaitWaitWha 4y ago
        Imagine "Microsoft Office"-complexity software developed specifically for public sector. Then, sold to public sector once, then everyone else is free to use it. Would Microsoft still develops Office? Unlikely.
        yxhuvud 4y ago
        What would happen then is that the next public sector organization would want to pay someone to either fix bugs or to specialize the program to fit their needs better. And the more installations, the more this would happen. Maintenance is not free and the public sector would still have to pay the bill for it.
        Rygian 4y ago
        Why would that be unlikely? If Microsoft's business model was to get paid to develop Office, then of course they would. (Obviously, Microsoft's actual business model is to capture and lock in, that's what makes your example look odd.)
        4y ago
- EMIRELADERO 4y ago
  I believe this is directed more towards government-developed software, not explicitly contractors.
  - Maxburn 4y ago
    I stand corrected.
  - Findecanor 4y ago
    Although, where I live (in a well-off EU country dominated by socio-liberal politics) I've never heard of a governmental organisation developing their own code (outside of the defence department). When there is a need for a system, there is a public procurement process wherein contractors submit bids, and the "best" bid wins. ("best" by some criteria, usually price)
  - richardwhiuk 4y ago
    If it only applies to that case, it's possible there will be a perverse incentive for the public sector to outsource the code development.
- marcodiego 4y ago
  AFAIK, most devs contracted to develop proprietary have much less rights about the code they write than FLOSS devs.
- sophacles 4y ago
  Go ahead, take your toys and go home. I don't care if the rent-seekers stop trying to waste my tax dollars - in fact contrary to your implication, this is a feature!
  - Maxburn 4y ago
    Seriously, dealing with government entities is a PITA. Life is much easier in private sector.
- AlotOfReading 4y ago
  You can still sell the code, you just have to use something like the Red Hat subscription model after the first contract. This is how a substantial part of the tech market already operates. How does it 'backfire' here?
  - Maxburn 4y ago
    Why would I change my entire business model to deal with this? Just skip this customer and move on.
    - AlotOfReading 4y ago
      Because "this customer" would presumably be the government. If you're a government contractor bidding on RFPs, not meeting the basic requirements is probably a bad way to stay in business. No one's forcing you to do it, though.
    - simion314 4y ago
      You are bidding for a contract that asks you to release the code, bid accordingly, if you have super secret code then don't bid at all or increase your bid. The hope is the public will get some open source code they can fix in future if there is a need and not have to beg you years later to please fix stuff or add a new feature. As I private person I can offer a programming projects but demand access to the source code , you are free not to bid for my project but I think I am the sane one that wants the code so i am not locked into a corner.
- archontes 4y ago
  If you develop the software completely at your own expense, and then sell the product to the government, fine. If the government is paying for the development, the government should own the product of that work.
- Zigurd 4y ago
  If you tried that with a private sector customer you would get nowhere.
sonicggg 4y ago
Exact same story with publicly financed research going behind paywalled journals. If we're paying for it, we should have access. Maybe time to have an equivalent of SciHub for code as well, although it will probably be harder to source that.
- NGRhodes 4y ago
  I know off the top of my head 2 examples where code can be stored for research: Zenodo: https://about.zenodo.org/ https://about.zenodo.org/ OSF: https://osf.io/ https://osf.io/
postalrat 4y ago
The state I lived in developed one of those covid tracking apps. I asked for the source code and was told it wasn't available and would never be. I talked to people working on other software developed for the state and they all think that software shouldn't be public. It seems crazy to me that taxpayers pay for this software but it doesn't belong to them. Knowing what I do know I gotta wonder if it's just about those developers being ashamed how bad their software is and don't want others to see it.
- jahewson 4y ago
  Define “belong”.
- EMIRELADERO 4y ago
  I don't know if it exists for where you live, but you might be able to make use of a public information law (FOIA-like)
  - datavirtue 4y ago
    I'm stunned that I had never thought to use a FOIA request for source code until seeing your comment. This is very tempting.
    - kingcharles 4y ago
      From a very experienced FOIA litigator, most of the time your FOIA request will be denied and then you'll have to sue to get the records. Typical time for these cases is 2-4 years of court appearances in trial court, then another 2 years in appellate court to get a favorable decision. A buddy of mine just won one that finally set the precedent that database schemas are not security: https://twitter.com/foiachap/status/1215388081378988039 https://twitter.com/foiachap/status/1215388081378988039
      - prepend 4y ago
        Also, once you finally get the zip file of source it will be a giant mess that doesn’t have build scripts, nor documentation, etc. So you’ll win, but won’t get want you want- a way to view, understand, improve, and share.
aeharding 4y ago
Likewise, free public apis (for non-sensitive info, at least). I appreciate NOAA's api.weather.gov, rucsoundings.noaa.gov, and other free public APIs. Also good to see the FAA dipping their toes in free public APIs (api.faa.gov).
RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
Why do software developers always shoot themselves in the foot with regard to their economic value? Governments pay all the time for development of technology that they buy, but that doesn't mean that the IP is released. For example, the government paid Boeing to develop transport aircraft. However, that does not mean that all the drawings/plans/etc for the aircraft are made public. The government is buying a set of functionality with public money. As long as they are getting that functionality, it doesn't matter that the code is proprietary.
- ceeplusplus 4y ago
  The government paying for software to be developed is quite a bit different from a SaaS offering. If I pay some guy on Upwork to build something for me I expect the source code. Of course the SaaS model is much better for developers to realize their worth, because you are essentially creating capital goods as a developer and being the owner of those goods is much more profitable than selling them.
- postalrat 4y ago
  What would be the expectation of source code ownership if you hired consultants or a team of developers to produce a piece of software for you? Do they keep it proprietary to themselves or should it belong to you?
- automatoney 4y ago
  Some of us value other things (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source-software_movement#Motivations_of_programmers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source-software_movement#...) more than additional compensation. These ideas have roots in the original hacker culture that this site was named for - this stuff is the foundation of a lot of computer culture.
  - nonrandomstring 4y ago
    Increasingly I hear this expressed as "Technology In The Public Interest", and is a movement I strongly affiliate with because it is related to national security (as I have defined it elsewhere) [0] as resilience and sustainability. See writing [1] and institutional support [2][3] separate from notions of software freedom as traditionally carried by Stallman et al/EFF/GNU/FSF. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31108570 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31108570 [1] https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2019/01/the_public-interest_.html https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2019/01/the_public-... [2] https://www.macfound.org/programs/technology/ https://www.macfound.org/programs/technology/ [3] https://www.fordfoundation.org/news-and-stories/big-ideas/public-interest-technology/ https://www.fordfoundation.org/news-and-stories/big-ideas/pu...
giobox 4y ago
I've often wondered if we need to radically change the State's relationship with the software it produces. As Robert Lessig famously observed, "code is law" in a world controlled by computers. There is increasingly a strong argument I feel in States directly employing software engineers much like they typically employ armies of civil servants to implement policy. Why is software treated as something to be outsourced to a private sector company? Why can't we have "civil programmers" who contribute to an ever growing body of public code just as the legislative process contributes to an ever growing body of laws. This body of civil programmers (terrible name but hey) could also work hand in hand with the open source community, letting stakeholders (citizens) contribute too.
- rozularen 4y ago
  I think it's mainly because of money? Sure if there were any existing public open source infrastructure people would be more willing to contribute for free. I think this brings the open source developers income issue to the table which is getting better but at its own pace.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Mainly because the government has no expertise in the area, so you have to convince politicians (who have no expertise in the area) that it is important, against those who DO have funding and will fight it as being "insecure" and various other buzzwords. Governments often don't even employ the armies of civil servants anymore, lots and lots of stuff is contracted out. The way around this might be to convince some of the smaller "tech wannabe" states to enact something, and let it grow from there.
- jmole 4y ago
  Code is only half of the problem here. The other half is operations. Applications don't just run on their own; they need deployment, maintenance, backup, recovery, new feature requests, etc. etc. Unlike the majority of infrastructure in the world, software literally isn't set in stone. This makes it much more powerful in some senses, but also much more fragile. Look at Hoover Dam - a project designed to last a hundred years with a pretty singular purpose. The operation and maintenance burden is clear, and basically unchanging throughout the lifetime of the dam. I agree with you in general here, but I think the actual work involved with your proposal is more akin to what the IT departments at agencies like the IRS or DMV are already doing. Specing systems for internal processes, and managing dataflow from old systems to new ones.
AlbertCory 4y ago
Totally right. The same applies to publicly funded research (goodbye, Elsevier), and even to court filings (goodbye, Pacer). As for postalrat's comment: there is a certain bureaucratic mindset that wants "their" stuff secret. Even when there's no possible justification. "You can't get in trouble for saying No" is their philosophy. Example: on Nextdoor (home of the dumbest people on the web), I stopped getting my daily email digest. Since this happens to be my ideal way to get Nextdoo, I emailed Support, and their person insisted that they were going out, and I should contact my email provider (they were not going to Spam, if that's your guess). I asked "how do you know? did you look in the Sent folder?" and he/she said "we're unable to share any information about our internal tools." Ooh, it's a SECRET! I went through Twitter and found out they were running an experiment.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
goatcode 4y ago
Any public money should bind the recipient to following public laws that govern government, including access to information. Don't like it as a corporation? Don't take public money.
reillyse 4y ago
Large consulting companies like Accenture have entire divisions of their business devoted to "government". These divisions make money by developing software for governments. It is very much against their interest for this software to be open source because 1) there is visibility into their performance and 2) they can't sell very similar software to the same government if everyone knows what software they've already built. These are the real vested interests preventing this code becoming open source and why lots of government agencies who do their own development are perfectly happy to release the code or access to their APIs.
- Zigurd 4y ago
  One reason why government software development is separated from contract development work for private sector clients is that private sector clients understand that they own the results and can disclose that code if they want to. They are relying on bamboozling government clients. All the more reason for struct laws about disclosure of software developed for governments.
- krisoft 4y ago
  > These are the real vested interests preventing this code becoming open source Absolutely. They are not going to do this by asking them nicely. That is why it must become the law. Software developed for public money must be released under a recognised open source licence.
- mt_ 4y ago
  The reason you pointed out why this won't gain traction is why it needs to gain traction.
- puritanicdev 4y ago
  A few years ago, I did a consulting for an IT agency and had insight into their code, including some projects done for the government. It was a worst mess of spaghetti code I've ever seen. For one of those projects they've hired people without any or little experience for cheap, and sold them as seniors for a crazy price.
- johnfarrelldev 4y ago
layer8 4y ago
While I generally agree, publishing code commonly requires additional effort and diligence, such as checking the licensing situation of third-party code used, possibly anonymizing the devs involved, maintaining the public repository and credentials, dealing with all the communication from the public caused by publishing the code, and so on. Hence it also increases the cost for the taxpayers, and that needs to be factored into the cost estimates of software projects. It’s not like they can just dump their git repository into alt.binaries.
- SparkyMcUnicorn 4y ago
  > Hence it also increases the cost for the taxpayers Isn't that just a short-term problem? Mid to long term, it should decrease costs dramatically.
  - layer8 4y ago
    How so? Because of external contributors? Most software developed for the public sector is quite use-case specific (and the use-cases are often quite boring), so I don’t see that happening for most projects.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      Over time the use-cases will grow, and if done right you'll start being able to "borrow" from similar use-cases in other areas/governments. It WOULD likely require massive retooling as much "government code" is more like "black box machine that does X" than "fancy new web-app".
      - layer8 4y ago
        In my experience, that doesn’t happen much even between projects within a single software company, because requirements are too diverse and change too frequently. Pushing for synergies also tends to create all sorts of internal political dynamics. At best it’s a long shot, with high risk of not amortizing the cost. The rest of the world, including the open-source world, also isn’t a promising role model, with the constant churn, fragmentation and evolution of languages, frameworks, libraries and tooling.
_trackno5 4y ago
Question for HN: How could this possibly work with software developed for the military?
- krisoft 4y ago
  Freedom of information laws frequently have national security interest exceptions. A similar carve out can be made from the requirement of open sourcing public funded software.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  Kerckhoff-Shannon principle. Unless I can assume that my enemy has total access to knowledge of my mechanisms, but is in no way advantaged with respect to my operations, it is not an effective weapon.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  I'm pretty sure the military both uses and contributes to FOSS. Tor was a US Navy project.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Moiman 4y ago
  Military gets open source code. Military doesn't have to publish it for everybody.
figassis 4y ago
I'm wondering. If the govt pays you to build software, and you use include proprietary libraries in order to build a custom solution, so that the solution is owned by the government, should you open source everything incl. the proprietary components? I get the feeling that is what contractors are trying to avoid so they can keep their competitive advantages. That and hiding horrible code.
- phoronixrly 4y ago
  Bulgaria's laws on the matter require you to provide a shim so that the software can be built without the functionality provided by the proprietary closed-source dependency.
b20000 4y ago
I know of several situations where entrepreneurs in europe put substantial money on the table in projects which were funded by grants from the government. It would be really bad for entrepreneurship in europe if it would be required to make software open source the moment some grant money is involved. Let's imagine you spend 500K of your savings, and the government gives you a 50K grant. Now you need to open source your software, and your competitors can run off with your 500K investment! the grant money offsets the insanely high taxes and should be no strings attached to stimulate entrepreneurship.
- Forgeties79 4y ago
  I can’t tell based on the information on the site, but there may be some nuance to the threshold where this becomes a requirement. I imagine it will not be an all or nothing situation, but I am not sure ultimately. Also, if there was a bunch of public code available because of grant funding, that means - in theory - many people might not have to invest their own money (or quite as much) because there is more out there they can use due to this law. Ultimately it boils down to the language of the law and the I social scenario.
  - b20000 4y ago
    ah yes, in good european fashion, there will be all kinds of complicated and time consuming rules and processes. that is what the countries in the EU and the commission do best. make it nearly impossible for small bootstrapped companies to be competitive and get their shit done. and if I as an entrepreneur put money into something, I expect to own it. even if a grant was involved. after all, I already paid taxes to make those grants possible in the first place.
    - Forgeties79 4y ago
      Frankly it sounds like you're prematurely grinding your axe. We don't have enough details to really form an opinion like that. As a fellow entrepreneur I am excited at the idea of more open collaboration/resources for people writing code. Hell imagine a world without GitHub. I'm curious to see the nitty gritty here myself.
tommyage 4y ago
Im currently working as a software architect for the government. The software we are developing is not beneficial to any citizen. Additionally, there is no staff to review and merge improvements. And merges need to get tested by regression as well, so bringing it to production would be cumberstone. Nonetheless, if we use another piece of software, we are preferring solutions where the code is open sourced. There needs to be enterprise support, though. And most of our colleagues are also pushing to pay our consultancies to improve these pieces of software. Our use cases with these solutions are kind of essential, so there are no possibilties to "give back". Any federal agency is supposed to cover one aspect of the government services. Developing individual software, which cover national laws. Also note that our software is almost 90% legacy code. And new solutions need to work around these quirks.
productceo 4y ago
I don't think it'll be technically possible to release code to the taxpayers and no one else. It may be the case that code should be released publicly. But their reasoning does not seem applicable.
openthc 4y ago
Many States in the USA have implemented a "track-and-trace" program for their cannabis. The States use this information for enforcement. These programs have many bugs -- observable/repeatable bugs. Then enforcement uses the data from the buggy software to cite businesses for failures of their "track-and-trace" requirements. (eg: the system magically restores weight to zero-weight lots, or marks dead trees as alive). In Washington State they started with BioTrackTHC; couldn't share the code cause it's a proprietary and a security risk; however they were dumping parts of the database as CSVs so folk could check that (and confirm some bugs!). Then WA switched to LeafData (MJ Freeway) and wouldn't share that code either; continued to share similar data-dumps. Now WA has moved to just uploading CSVs to the State system in code they wrote themselves -- and still won't share the code (and now are doing even less to share the data). It's frustrating when viable open source solutions exist and are actively ignored by the State agencies (we were blocked from even participating in workgroups about the future of T&T (which don't really matter, they didn't even follow the recommendations of their own workgroups))
victorvosk 4y ago
I mean as nice as this sounds, our money is spent on all sorts of things we know nothing about. Should we all be provided with the schematics for F-35s?
- pessimizer 4y ago
  > Should we all be provided with the schematics for F-35s? They should be leaked to China as sabotage.
- atx42 4y ago
  Exactly! Where do you draw the line? Does CIA/NSA have to drop their shorts?
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    Any hypothetical obligation-to-make-code-public act could probably be guided by the thinking that went into the parameters of FOIA exemptions, since code is, after all, information.
  - 8note 4y ago
    The CIA, maybe not, but the NSA for sure. All the bulk surveillance and so on being done to Americans in america should be completely transparent to its citizens, so they can be clear that their rights are not being stepped on
  - toomanybeersies 4y ago
    Ironically, the NSA is probably one of the better US Gov agencies when it comes to open sourcing their software: https://github.com/nationalsecurityagency https://github.com/nationalsecurityagency
sam_lowry_ 4y ago
I signed up, but it gives me a stupid "20 requests per hour" error page.
yoru-sulfur 4y ago
There are a few groups doing public open source that I'm aware of: - 18F https://github.com/18f https://github.com/18f - GDS https://github.com/alphagov https://github.com/alphagov - CDS https://github.com/cds-snc https://github.com/cds-snc I do agree with the sentiment, it's absurd that any software developed through public means is not available to the public.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
gr33nq 4y ago
I work in the public sector (US), and I have been advocating for something like this since I started my career. The ERP we use for HR/Payroll, Accounts Payable/Receivable, Utility Billing, etc. costs an exorbitant amount of money each year, and the quality of both the software and the technical support we receive is comical. And this is new deployment, too. We upgraded from an IBM AS/400-based system a couple of years ago which I honestly long to go back to now and again out of frustration. Let me give you just one an example of how we are held hostage to a private software vendor - collecting payment for utility bills. We are forced to use one credit card processor because it's the only "partner" that the ERP vendor has for payment processing. I guarantee you that you've never heard of them before. Their software is abysmal, and last time I checked, the ERP vendor gets a flat rate for each payment they collect (in addition to the standard credit card processing % + flat fee that goes to the merchant services company). There's no alternative. It's a Windows Service that has a tendency to crash several times a day without logging anything to Event Viewer. It's known to charge a credit card, but not return a success code to back the ERP, meaning the money was collected but their bill doesn't show as being paid. It's a problem I've documented clearly and created tickets on for over seven months at this point, and it's still not been resolved. Why? They have zero motivation. It's a beast to migrate to a new ERP (multiple years and $1M+), and they treat us as if we have no leverage in pushing for prompter support or better quality software. So luckily we are still on-premise with full access to the SQL database. I have written procedures to update the payment status manually each time this happens, post the transaction to the ERP, update reference numbers, and do a few other various things that should happen automatically when it works correctly. We were scolded for digging around ourselves and doing this, but if we open a support case, it takes 2-14 days to get a response back and that's simply not feasible when these payments need to post before EOB. There's also no open API available. We have the in-house expertise to develop integrations and try to tie systems together in ways that make sense for our environment. Nope. Whatever few integrations that exists costs tens of thousands of dollars up-front, have very lackluster support, are infrequently updated, and are very rigid in their capabilities. I've asked how we can gain access to a sandbox environment or get documentation on an API so we can test and create the integrations that these sacred "partners" are able to -- radio silence. I've even reached out to individuals who work at the company on LinkedIn asking a similar question of how an independent developer can integrate with their ERP ecosystem -- left on read, no response. Need a customization or change? Let's schedule a series of meetings and get it quoted out. $5,000 and two months later, we now have one new line of text displayed on our water bills about the drought. This is the level of control they maintain and use to line their pockets at our expense. And now I've noticed that over the past year or so, there's been a very aggressive push to move to a SaaS environment. Meaning we'd lose direct access to SQL, lose access to logs and other tools I use to debug/diagnose, and be reliant on (read: held hostage by) the vendor even more. Good luck getting access to any of our raw data at that point. It's vendor lock-in to an extreme. We (the agency, but more so the tax payers by extension) are victims. And we take it willingly without any pushback because there's no alternative. If anyone reading this is interested in helping fight against this or develop an open source alternative specific to government agencies, please reach out to me (email in profile here). I'm very passionate about this, having suffered so much aggravation over the years, and would love to work on bringing about some sort of solution.
redocneknurd 4y ago
Isn’t this quite hard to implement? How do you distinguish between Saas, software and custom services. Will this implicate that Microsoft office needs to be open source just because some government is buying that software?
- colonwqbang 4y ago
  You cannot actually buy Office, only license it from Microsoft. Here the author seems to be talking about software that was originally written by the government. Or, one supposes, where development is chiefly funded by the government.
j_leboulanger 4y ago
https://code.gouv.fr/ https://code.gouv.fr/
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jdrc 4y ago
I am more interested in public government code being shared with other EU countries. EU funds a lot of government software projects , but they never end up becoming EU-wide projects. EU is all about enabling common standards across countries. And what better way to enforce them than by using common software across the EU states.
- layer8 4y ago
  The EU actually has some open source programs, see for example https://github.com/ConnectingEurope https://github.com/ConnectingEurope.
didip 4y ago
I hope this apply to patents as well. There are too many drug research funded by the public but the IP ended up owned by private companies.
- 4khilles 4y ago
  Is this a case where 100% of a research effort is publicly funded or more like 10%? If it's closer to 10%, why would a company take the risk of putting up 90% of the capital when they can just wait for their competitor's IP to become public? Maybe the duration of a patent should depend on how much public funding was received.
inChargeOfIT 4y ago
The US is getting better about it, some more than others, but a few off the top of my head.. https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs https://github.com/nationalsecurityagency https://github.com/nationalsecurityagency https://github.com/GSA https://github.com/GSA https://github.com/CMSgov https://github.com/CMSgov https://github.com/CDCgov https://github.com/CDCgov
- toomanybeersies 4y ago
  You missed the 18F Github org [1], also from the GSA. I wonder if there's a directory of government Github orgs somewhere? [1] https://github.com/18F https://github.com/18F
  - prepend 4y ago
    Yes, there’s https://government.github.com/community/ https://government.github.com/community/ And GSA keeps a list, sort of, of all the US gov projects at code.gsa.gov. But the code activity got defunded a year or two ago and no longer updates a consolidated catalog and now just points to all the various departments.
- cmutel 4y ago
  https://github.com/USEPA/ https://github.com/USEPA/
- prepend 4y ago
  Funny story about CDCgov. Probably the most common question we get is “you should use CDC instead of CDCgov.” Someone else has @CDC as they got there first. They aren’t active so CDC tried to get in touch with them and GitHub doesn’t provide a way to contact people. That’s kind of nice actually, they respect privacy. GitHub did offer to contact the user without sharing the users contact info. They asked if @CDC was active and if not, would they mind letting CDC.gov use it. The user responded that they are active, just not with public activity. And that they would like to keep it. I thought the whole process was pretty nice. Github respected the user, and still tried to help. User considered and didn’t change their existing account. Some people got upset and tried to formulate plans to “make” the user give it up, but those weren’t pursued because it would be wrong and a waste of efforts and, I think, harmful to the purpose for collaborative software. So that’s how CDCgov exists. And I suspect there’s a similar story behind CMSgov and all the other sites where staff were too slow to set stuff up.
bumper_crop 4y ago
Suppose you are on a committee where you are evaluating 3 different offers to build a website for your city. Bid A is for $10m, Bid B is for $9.5m, and Bid C is for $9m. The company that made offer B knows that they will likely lose the contract so they counter. "If you let us keep the source code and it remains private, we will bid $8.5m for the contract". Since all three vendors are offering equivalent service, and vendor B is offering a hefty $500,000 discount, how can you reasonably spend far more or your city's money? That money could have gone to improve schools or roads or make more competitive offers for city employees. How can you justify spending a half million more on software principle when there are other more pressing needs? Expecting software to be open source is nice when there is an army of 10s of thousands of FAANG employees to constantly keep it up to date, but less so when there's limited people. Sure, it hypothetically could be kept up to date by the generous and capable people of the city after the fact, but that's farfetched. It isn't realistic or practical for a budget-conscious software company to open them selves up to scrutiny, participate in the open source community, accept bug fixes, do code reviews from strangers, etc. It's more expensive to do OSS, not less. (As an example, the Linux Kernel is mainly made by large companies with lots of expensive employees. Pick your 10 favorite GitHub project with more than 10k stars and see who the primary contributors are.)
- rasulkireev 4y ago
  Well, making it open source is not the same as making regular citizens/programmers to work on it. You still pay the company to develop and maintain the software. Same way as open source developers get "sponsored". The reason is that anyone who wants to see the code and suggest on how to make it better, or to report a bug, then that would be possible. Furthermore, that work can be reused by other parts of the government. That last point is why some companies wouldn't want to do it, or would charge more. However, to your point, I think the increased cost is worth it in this case. Sure, there are going to be less better roads/schools by 500k, but the problem with that money is that there are rarely big projects for that amount, so it's not like they would be put to best use without being "lost" in the process of relocation.
- 8note 4y ago
  Who will do the maintaining on the closed website though? One company has a monopoly on the support
squinta 4y ago
Italian Digital public administration code (CAD - Codice amministrazione digitale, art. 68 and 69) requires software created with public money to be open sourced and made accessible for reuse by everyone. https://developers.italia.it/en/reuse https://developers.italia.it/en/reuse Formerly it was accessible only to other public administrations. That provision didn't generate any meaningful outcomes as it was not avalable to other developers, just to public administrations in-house developers. With the last reform of the CAD in 2016, it was open to everyone and development of digital public services accelerated.
sublimefire 4y ago
Interesting comments throughout but.. - Selling to public sector is a costly and lengthy process. Not to mention the lack of competence from the public sector partners. - Usually, the money is made by making sure the entity will subscribe for as long as possible, and it should be possible to repackage the same software and sell to somebody else with little effort. - Open sourcing puts the company into a position where it's own code could be reused by the competitor without investing as much. - Furthermore, the projects are usually short lived due to the nature of procurement, budgeting and changing regulations. - It is a risky business that requires complicated solutions to complicated problems, not much of it is reusable outside of the specific domain. I was developing such software for years. Better ask yourself why huge IT departments are doing barely anything despite their funding.
softgrow 4y ago
I greatly appreciated the source code (probably FORTRAN) that I found in a university library in the late 80's. I seem to remember a book of microfiche with many basic algorithm's published on the basis that it was developed with US government with federal money and hence needed to published. So as an Australian I was very grateful for the implementation of Hungarian method (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_algorithm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_algorithm) that I used to write a Turbo-Pascal implementation for rostering problems. Anyone remember the name of the book/folder and the publisher?
- softgrow 4y ago
  Actually had the source code still kicking around on my laptop and it had a comment {ACSM Algorithm 415} which I think means, Communications of the ACM, Volume 14, Issue 12, Dec. 1971 pp 805–806 https://doi.org/10.1145/362919.362948 https://doi.org/10.1145/362919.362948 , its Pascal-ish pseudo-code with jumps/labels. So maybe the ACM was being generous not the US government.
Dracophoenix 4y ago
This would be a perfect motto for property tax assessments. It is ridiculous that no one has any idea if the value of their home is inflated/deflated by software or reflects a consistent correlation with a measurable value.
- prepend 4y ago
  My county purchased a service that automatically estimated values. It was a black box to them. During my appeal, they weren’t able to describe how it chose to raise property assessments on which properties as it wasn’t done on every house. They wouldn’t even reveal the vendor. They were getting a ton of appeals because they switched from a manual, poorly coordinated process to an automated process powered by a third party. It was very frustrating because the citizen review board accepted the appraiser’s number even though they couldn’t describe the methods and even though I brought dozens of comps showing a lower price and valuation of actual sales. They fixated on the number that the software produced. I think if software should be used like this it needs to be auditable and at least source available, if not foss.
sylware 4y ago
not enough: lean and simple, but able to do a good enough job, open source software/protocols, including SDKs (that exclude de-facto complex syntax languages with their compilers). Off-course the reality of a complete and reasonable functional software stack is actually made of several technical contexts and drawing the complexity lines at the right sweet spots is hard: mistakes will be made, due to the permanent/long-term toxic brain-washing/lobbying of big tech, and they will be "not free" to fix. Big tech wants to make you hard dependent on all their software and servers to create a permanent flow of money, which is much harder/impossible to do with centralized-server-less or local and independant software. Boiling frog strategy: for that, they have huge funding (blackrock/vanguard/etc) in order to make their companies (microsoft/google/etc) super cheap/free for a very long time and to suffocate competition over time which has less cash flow (those funds have thousands of billions of $). They will create server centralized services, with crippled user-side open source software (not really usable without their servers). They call that "software as a service". That said, some of them will manage to keep their "services" free selling user data to brokers and selling ads. The control of user-side software is via open source grotesque and absurde complexity and size: google(blink(~webkit)/geeko) and apple(webkit) based browsers with their compilers. They know only their army of devs can maintain it, and they have enough control to do planned obsolescence there as a bonus. Well, this is not very well explained, but I think it is enough to get the idea.
ksec 4y ago
I like the word Public Code and not Open Source, since modern definition of Open Source requires a community around it. But what license should this Public Code be? GPL like? AGPL? or Apache 2.0 and BSD like?

639 points by modinfo 4y ago

Wow, nice one, Facebook! I'm trying to share the link, and I get: "Posts that look like spam according to our Community Guidelines are blocked on Facebook and can't be edited."

yboris 4y ago
Confirming - I'm unable to post to my Facebook wall!

Maxburn 4y ago

If I was the software developer forced into this I'd just raise my price knowing I can no longer sell it elsewhere, IF I even agreed to it. That's going to hurt tax payers. It's a catchy title but just doesn't take more than a moments thought to see how it's going to backfire.

postalrat 4y ago
What do you mean? If you are a software developer working for a state or city you expect to sell the software you develop for them and collect the money yourself?
- Maxburn 4y ago
  Good point, I was only thinking about outside contractors.
  - postalrat 4y ago
    Contractors are no different. Typically you don't get to sell the software someone else paid for. If you want to sell it then develop it on your own.
    - WaitWaitWha 4y ago
      Right, and I am all for that to remain. This reads way broader, as you describe it "develop it on your own", but can sell it only once to public sector.
- WaitWaitWha 4y ago
  If I develop software specific to the public sector and sell it to the government, it is "publicly financed software developed for the public sector". What is my incentive to develop any software at all for public sector, since potential client no. 2 will just take the code that I released? The ask does not state employed by... it just says: “Implement legislation requiring that publicly financed software developed for the public sector be made publicly available under a Free and Open Source Software licence.” I would be fine with “Implement legislation requiring that publicly financed software developed by employees of public sector, for the public sector be made publicly available under a Free and Open Source Software licence.”
  - postalrat 4y ago
    Your incentive is that you are being paid.
    - WaitWaitWha 4y ago
      Imagine "Microsoft Office"-complexity software developed specifically for public sector. Then, sold to public sector once, then everyone else is free to use it. Would Microsoft still develops Office? Unlikely.
      - yxhuvud 4y ago
        What would happen then is that the next public sector organization would want to pay someone to either fix bugs or to specialize the program to fit their needs better. And the more installations, the more this would happen. Maintenance is not free and the public sector would still have to pay the bill for it.
      - Rygian 4y ago
        Why would that be unlikely? If Microsoft's business model was to get paid to develop Office, then of course they would. (Obviously, Microsoft's actual business model is to capture and lock in, that's what makes your example look odd.)
      - 4y ago
EMIRELADERO 4y ago
I believe this is directed more towards government-developed software, not explicitly contractors.
- Maxburn 4y ago
  I stand corrected.
- Findecanor 4y ago
  Although, where I live (in a well-off EU country dominated by socio-liberal politics) I've never heard of a governmental organisation developing their own code (outside of the defence department). When there is a need for a system, there is a public procurement process wherein contractors submit bids, and the "best" bid wins. ("best" by some criteria, usually price)
- richardwhiuk 4y ago
  If it only applies to that case, it's possible there will be a perverse incentive for the public sector to outsource the code development.
marcodiego 4y ago
AFAIK, most devs contracted to develop proprietary have much less rights about the code they write than FLOSS devs.
sophacles 4y ago
Go ahead, take your toys and go home. I don't care if the rent-seekers stop trying to waste my tax dollars - in fact contrary to your implication, this is a feature!
- Maxburn 4y ago
  Seriously, dealing with government entities is a PITA. Life is much easier in private sector.
AlotOfReading 4y ago
You can still sell the code, you just have to use something like the Red Hat subscription model after the first contract. This is how a substantial part of the tech market already operates. How does it 'backfire' here?
- Maxburn 4y ago
  Why would I change my entire business model to deal with this? Just skip this customer and move on.
  - AlotOfReading 4y ago
    Because "this customer" would presumably be the government. If you're a government contractor bidding on RFPs, not meeting the basic requirements is probably a bad way to stay in business. No one's forcing you to do it, though.
  - simion314 4y ago
    You are bidding for a contract that asks you to release the code, bid accordingly, if you have super secret code then don't bid at all or increase your bid. The hope is the public will get some open source code they can fix in future if there is a need and not have to beg you years later to please fix stuff or add a new feature. As I private person I can offer a programming projects but demand access to the source code , you are free not to bid for my project but I think I am the sane one that wants the code so i am not locked into a corner.
archontes 4y ago
If you develop the software completely at your own expense, and then sell the product to the government, fine. If the government is paying for the development, the government should own the product of that work.
Zigurd 4y ago
If you tried that with a private sector customer you would get nowhere.

sonicggg 4y ago

Exact same story with publicly financed research going behind paywalled journals. If we're paying for it, we should have access. Maybe time to have an equivalent of SciHub for code as well, although it will probably be harder to source that.

NGRhodes 4y ago
I know off the top of my head 2 examples where code can be stored for research: Zenodo: https://about.zenodo.org/ https://about.zenodo.org/ OSF: https://osf.io/ https://osf.io/

postalrat 4y ago

The state I lived in developed one of those covid tracking apps. I asked for the source code and was told it wasn't available and would never be. I talked to people working on other software developed for the state and they all think that software shouldn't be public. It seems crazy to me that taxpayers pay for this software but it doesn't belong to them. Knowing what I do know I gotta wonder if it's just about those developers being ashamed how bad their software is and don't want others to see it.

jahewson 4y ago
Define “belong”.
EMIRELADERO 4y ago
I don't know if it exists for where you live, but you might be able to make use of a public information law (FOIA-like)
- datavirtue 4y ago
  I'm stunned that I had never thought to use a FOIA request for source code until seeing your comment. This is very tempting.
  - kingcharles 4y ago
    From a very experienced FOIA litigator, most of the time your FOIA request will be denied and then you'll have to sue to get the records. Typical time for these cases is 2-4 years of court appearances in trial court, then another 2 years in appellate court to get a favorable decision. A buddy of mine just won one that finally set the precedent that database schemas are not security: https://twitter.com/foiachap/status/1215388081378988039 https://twitter.com/foiachap/status/1215388081378988039
    - prepend 4y ago
      Also, once you finally get the zip file of source it will be a giant mess that doesn’t have build scripts, nor documentation, etc. So you’ll win, but won’t get want you want- a way to view, understand, improve, and share.

aeharding 4y ago

Likewise, free public apis (for non-sensitive info, at least). I appreciate NOAA's api.weather.gov, rucsoundings.noaa.gov, and other free public APIs. Also good to see the FAA dipping their toes in free public APIs (api.faa.gov).

RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago

Why do software developers always shoot themselves in the foot with regard to their economic value? Governments pay all the time for development of technology that they buy, but that doesn't mean that the IP is released. For example, the government paid Boeing to develop transport aircraft. However, that does not mean that all the drawings/plans/etc for the aircraft are made public. The government is buying a set of functionality with public money. As long as they are getting that functionality, it doesn't matter that the code is proprietary.

ceeplusplus 4y ago
The government paying for software to be developed is quite a bit different from a SaaS offering. If I pay some guy on Upwork to build something for me I expect the source code. Of course the SaaS model is much better for developers to realize their worth, because you are essentially creating capital goods as a developer and being the owner of those goods is much more profitable than selling them.
postalrat 4y ago
What would be the expectation of source code ownership if you hired consultants or a team of developers to produce a piece of software for you? Do they keep it proprietary to themselves or should it belong to you?
automatoney 4y ago
Some of us value other things (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source-software_movement#Motivations_of_programmers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source-software_movement#...) more than additional compensation. These ideas have roots in the original hacker culture that this site was named for - this stuff is the foundation of a lot of computer culture.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  Increasingly I hear this expressed as "Technology In The Public Interest", and is a movement I strongly affiliate with because it is related to national security (as I have defined it elsewhere) [0] as resilience and sustainability. See writing [1] and institutional support [2][3] separate from notions of software freedom as traditionally carried by Stallman et al/EFF/GNU/FSF. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31108570 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31108570 [1] https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2019/01/the_public-interest_.html https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2019/01/the_public-... [2] https://www.macfound.org/programs/technology/ https://www.macfound.org/programs/technology/ [3] https://www.fordfoundation.org/news-and-stories/big-ideas/public-interest-technology/ https://www.fordfoundation.org/news-and-stories/big-ideas/pu...

giobox 4y ago

I've often wondered if we need to radically change the State's relationship with the software it produces. As Robert Lessig famously observed, "code is law" in a world controlled by computers. There is increasingly a strong argument I feel in States directly employing software engineers much like they typically employ armies of civil servants to implement policy. Why is software treated as something to be outsourced to a private sector company? Why can't we have "civil programmers" who contribute to an ever growing body of public code just as the legislative process contributes to an ever growing body of laws. This body of civil programmers (terrible name but hey) could also work hand in hand with the open source community, letting stakeholders (citizens) contribute too.

rozularen 4y ago
I think it's mainly because of money? Sure if there were any existing public open source infrastructure people would be more willing to contribute for free. I think this brings the open source developers income issue to the table which is getting better but at its own pace.
bombcar 4y ago
Mainly because the government has no expertise in the area, so you have to convince politicians (who have no expertise in the area) that it is important, against those who DO have funding and will fight it as being "insecure" and various other buzzwords. Governments often don't even employ the armies of civil servants anymore, lots and lots of stuff is contracted out. The way around this might be to convince some of the smaller "tech wannabe" states to enact something, and let it grow from there.
jmole 4y ago
Code is only half of the problem here. The other half is operations. Applications don't just run on their own; they need deployment, maintenance, backup, recovery, new feature requests, etc. etc. Unlike the majority of infrastructure in the world, software literally isn't set in stone. This makes it much more powerful in some senses, but also much more fragile. Look at Hoover Dam - a project designed to last a hundred years with a pretty singular purpose. The operation and maintenance burden is clear, and basically unchanging throughout the lifetime of the dam. I agree with you in general here, but I think the actual work involved with your proposal is more akin to what the IT departments at agencies like the IRS or DMV are already doing. Specing systems for internal processes, and managing dataflow from old systems to new ones.

AlbertCory 4y ago

Totally right. The same applies to publicly funded research (goodbye, Elsevier), and even to court filings (goodbye, Pacer). As for postalrat's comment: there is a certain bureaucratic mindset that wants "their" stuff secret. Even when there's no possible justification. "You can't get in trouble for saying No" is their philosophy. Example: on Nextdoor (home of the dumbest people on the web), I stopped getting my daily email digest. Since this happens to be my ideal way to get Nextdoo, I emailed Support, and their person insisted that they were going out, and I should contact my email provider (they were not going to Spam, if that's your guess). I asked "how do you know? did you look in the Sent folder?" and he/she said "we're unable to share any information about our internal tools." Ooh, it's a SECRET! I went through Twitter and found out they were running an experiment.

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goatcode 4y ago

Any public money should bind the recipient to following public laws that govern government, including access to information. Don't like it as a corporation? Don't take public money.

reillyse 4y ago

Large consulting companies like Accenture have entire divisions of their business devoted to "government". These divisions make money by developing software for governments. It is very much against their interest for this software to be open source because 1) there is visibility into their performance and 2) they can't sell very similar software to the same government if everyone knows what software they've already built. These are the real vested interests preventing this code becoming open source and why lots of government agencies who do their own development are perfectly happy to release the code or access to their APIs.

Zigurd 4y ago
One reason why government software development is separated from contract development work for private sector clients is that private sector clients understand that they own the results and can disclose that code if they want to. They are relying on bamboozling government clients. All the more reason for struct laws about disclosure of software developed for governments.
krisoft 4y ago
> These are the real vested interests preventing this code becoming open source Absolutely. They are not going to do this by asking them nicely. That is why it must become the law. Software developed for public money must be released under a recognised open source licence.
mt_ 4y ago
The reason you pointed out why this won't gain traction is why it needs to gain traction.
puritanicdev 4y ago
A few years ago, I did a consulting for an IT agency and had insight into their code, including some projects done for the government. It was a worst mess of spaghetti code I've ever seen. For one of those projects they've hired people without any or little experience for cheap, and sold them as seniors for a crazy price.
johnfarrelldev 4y ago

layer8 4y ago

While I generally agree, publishing code commonly requires additional effort and diligence, such as checking the licensing situation of third-party code used, possibly anonymizing the devs involved, maintaining the public repository and credentials, dealing with all the communication from the public caused by publishing the code, and so on. Hence it also increases the cost for the taxpayers, and that needs to be factored into the cost estimates of software projects. It’s not like they can just dump their git repository into alt.binaries.

SparkyMcUnicorn 4y ago
> Hence it also increases the cost for the taxpayers Isn't that just a short-term problem? Mid to long term, it should decrease costs dramatically.
- layer8 4y ago
  How so? Because of external contributors? Most software developed for the public sector is quite use-case specific (and the use-cases are often quite boring), so I don’t see that happening for most projects.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Over time the use-cases will grow, and if done right you'll start being able to "borrow" from similar use-cases in other areas/governments. It WOULD likely require massive retooling as much "government code" is more like "black box machine that does X" than "fancy new web-app".
    - layer8 4y ago
      In my experience, that doesn’t happen much even between projects within a single software company, because requirements are too diverse and change too frequently. Pushing for synergies also tends to create all sorts of internal political dynamics. At best it’s a long shot, with high risk of not amortizing the cost. The rest of the world, including the open-source world, also isn’t a promising role model, with the constant churn, fragmentation and evolution of languages, frameworks, libraries and tooling.

_trackno5 4y ago

Question for HN: How could this possibly work with software developed for the military?

krisoft 4y ago
Freedom of information laws frequently have national security interest exceptions. A similar carve out can be made from the requirement of open sourcing public funded software.
nonrandomstring 4y ago
Kerckhoff-Shannon principle. Unless I can assume that my enemy has total access to knowledge of my mechanisms, but is in no way advantaged with respect to my operations, it is not an effective weapon.
pessimizer 4y ago
I'm pretty sure the military both uses and contributes to FOSS. Tor was a US Navy project.
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Moiman 4y ago
Military gets open source code. Military doesn't have to publish it for everybody.

figassis 4y ago

I'm wondering. If the govt pays you to build software, and you use include proprietary libraries in order to build a custom solution, so that the solution is owned by the government, should you open source everything incl. the proprietary components? I get the feeling that is what contractors are trying to avoid so they can keep their competitive advantages. That and hiding horrible code.

phoronixrly 4y ago
Bulgaria's laws on the matter require you to provide a shim so that the software can be built without the functionality provided by the proprietary closed-source dependency.

b20000 4y ago

I know of several situations where entrepreneurs in europe put substantial money on the table in projects which were funded by grants from the government. It would be really bad for entrepreneurship in europe if it would be required to make software open source the moment some grant money is involved. Let's imagine you spend 500K of your savings, and the government gives you a 50K grant. Now you need to open source your software, and your competitors can run off with your 500K investment! the grant money offsets the insanely high taxes and should be no strings attached to stimulate entrepreneurship.

Forgeties79 4y ago
I can’t tell based on the information on the site, but there may be some nuance to the threshold where this becomes a requirement. I imagine it will not be an all or nothing situation, but I am not sure ultimately. Also, if there was a bunch of public code available because of grant funding, that means - in theory - many people might not have to invest their own money (or quite as much) because there is more out there they can use due to this law. Ultimately it boils down to the language of the law and the I social scenario.
- b20000 4y ago
  ah yes, in good european fashion, there will be all kinds of complicated and time consuming rules and processes. that is what the countries in the EU and the commission do best. make it nearly impossible for small bootstrapped companies to be competitive and get their shit done. and if I as an entrepreneur put money into something, I expect to own it. even if a grant was involved. after all, I already paid taxes to make those grants possible in the first place.
  - Forgeties79 4y ago
    Frankly it sounds like you're prematurely grinding your axe. We don't have enough details to really form an opinion like that. As a fellow entrepreneur I am excited at the idea of more open collaboration/resources for people writing code. Hell imagine a world without GitHub. I'm curious to see the nitty gritty here myself.

tommyage 4y ago

Im currently working as a software architect for the government. The software we are developing is not beneficial to any citizen. Additionally, there is no staff to review and merge improvements. And merges need to get tested by regression as well, so bringing it to production would be cumberstone. Nonetheless, if we use another piece of software, we are preferring solutions where the code is open sourced. There needs to be enterprise support, though. And most of our colleagues are also pushing to pay our consultancies to improve these pieces of software. Our use cases with these solutions are kind of essential, so there are no possibilties to "give back". Any federal agency is supposed to cover one aspect of the government services. Developing individual software, which cover national laws. Also note that our software is almost 90% legacy code. And new solutions need to work around these quirks.

productceo 4y ago

I don't think it'll be technically possible to release code to the taxpayers and no one else. It may be the case that code should be released publicly. But their reasoning does not seem applicable.

openthc 4y ago

Many States in the USA have implemented a "track-and-trace" program for their cannabis. The States use this information for enforcement. These programs have many bugs -- observable/repeatable bugs. Then enforcement uses the data from the buggy software to cite businesses for failures of their "track-and-trace" requirements. (eg: the system magically restores weight to zero-weight lots, or marks dead trees as alive). In Washington State they started with BioTrackTHC; couldn't share the code cause it's a proprietary and a security risk; however they were dumping parts of the database as CSVs so folk could check that (and confirm some bugs!). Then WA switched to LeafData (MJ Freeway) and wouldn't share that code either; continued to share similar data-dumps. Now WA has moved to just uploading CSVs to the State system in code they wrote themselves -- and still won't share the code (and now are doing even less to share the data). It's frustrating when viable open source solutions exist and are actively ignored by the State agencies (we were blocked from even participating in workgroups about the future of T&T (which don't really matter, they didn't even follow the recommendations of their own workgroups))

victorvosk 4y ago

I mean as nice as this sounds, our money is spent on all sorts of things we know nothing about. Should we all be provided with the schematics for F-35s?

pessimizer 4y ago
> Should we all be provided with the schematics for F-35s? They should be leaked to China as sabotage.
atx42 4y ago
Exactly! Where do you draw the line? Does CIA/NSA have to drop their shorts?
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  Any hypothetical obligation-to-make-code-public act could probably be guided by the thinking that went into the parameters of FOIA exemptions, since code is, after all, information.
- 8note 4y ago
  The CIA, maybe not, but the NSA for sure. All the bulk surveillance and so on being done to Americans in america should be completely transparent to its citizens, so they can be clear that their rights are not being stepped on
- toomanybeersies 4y ago
  Ironically, the NSA is probably one of the better US Gov agencies when it comes to open sourcing their software: https://github.com/nationalsecurityagency https://github.com/nationalsecurityagency

sam_lowry_ 4y ago

I signed up, but it gives me a stupid "20 requests per hour" error page.

yoru-sulfur 4y ago

There are a few groups doing public open source that I'm aware of: - 18F https://github.com/18f https://github.com/18f - GDS https://github.com/alphagov https://github.com/alphagov - CDS https://github.com/cds-snc https://github.com/cds-snc I do agree with the sentiment, it's absurd that any software developed through public means is not available to the public.

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gr33nq 4y ago

I work in the public sector (US), and I have been advocating for something like this since I started my career. The ERP we use for HR/Payroll, Accounts Payable/Receivable, Utility Billing, etc. costs an exorbitant amount of money each year, and the quality of both the software and the technical support we receive is comical. And this is new deployment, too. We upgraded from an IBM AS/400-based system a couple of years ago which I honestly long to go back to now and again out of frustration. Let me give you just one an example of how we are held hostage to a private software vendor - collecting payment for utility bills. We are forced to use one credit card processor because it's the only "partner" that the ERP vendor has for payment processing. I guarantee you that you've never heard of them before. Their software is abysmal, and last time I checked, the ERP vendor gets a flat rate for each payment they collect (in addition to the standard credit card processing % + flat fee that goes to the merchant services company). There's no alternative. It's a Windows Service that has a tendency to crash several times a day without logging anything to Event Viewer. It's known to charge a credit card, but not return a success code to back the ERP, meaning the money was collected but their bill doesn't show as being paid. It's a problem I've documented clearly and created tickets on for over seven months at this point, and it's still not been resolved. Why? They have zero motivation. It's a beast to migrate to a new ERP (multiple years and $1M+), and they treat us as if we have no leverage in pushing for prompter support or better quality software. So luckily we are still on-premise with full access to the SQL database. I have written procedures to update the payment status manually each time this happens, post the transaction to the ERP, update reference numbers, and do a few other various things that should happen automatically when it works correctly. We were scolded for digging around ourselves and doing this, but if we open a support case, it takes 2-14 days to get a response back and that's simply not feasible when these payments need to post before EOB. There's also no open API available. We have the in-house expertise to develop integrations and try to tie systems together in ways that make sense for our environment. Nope. Whatever few integrations that exists costs tens of thousands of dollars up-front, have very lackluster support, are infrequently updated, and are very rigid in their capabilities. I've asked how we can gain access to a sandbox environment or get documentation on an API so we can test and create the integrations that these sacred "partners" are able to -- radio silence. I've even reached out to individuals who work at the company on LinkedIn asking a similar question of how an independent developer can integrate with their ERP ecosystem -- left on read, no response. Need a customization or change? Let's schedule a series of meetings and get it quoted out. $5,000 and two months later, we now have one new line of text displayed on our water bills about the drought. This is the level of control they maintain and use to line their pockets at our expense. And now I've noticed that over the past year or so, there's been a very aggressive push to move to a SaaS environment. Meaning we'd lose direct access to SQL, lose access to logs and other tools I use to debug/diagnose, and be reliant on (read: held hostage by) the vendor even more. Good luck getting access to any of our raw data at that point. It's vendor lock-in to an extreme. We (the agency, but more so the tax payers by extension) are victims. And we take it willingly without any pushback because there's no alternative. If anyone reading this is interested in helping fight against this or develop an open source alternative specific to government agencies, please reach out to me (email in profile here). I'm very passionate about this, having suffered so much aggravation over the years, and would love to work on bringing about some sort of solution.

redocneknurd 4y ago

Isn’t this quite hard to implement? How do you distinguish between Saas, software and custom services. Will this implicate that Microsoft office needs to be open source just because some government is buying that software?

colonwqbang 4y ago
You cannot actually buy Office, only license it from Microsoft. Here the author seems to be talking about software that was originally written by the government. Or, one supposes, where development is chiefly funded by the government.

j_leboulanger 4y ago

https://code.gouv.fr/ https://code.gouv.fr/

deleted 4y ago

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jdrc 4y ago

I am more interested in public government code being shared with other EU countries. EU funds a lot of government software projects , but they never end up becoming EU-wide projects. EU is all about enabling common standards across countries. And what better way to enforce them than by using common software across the EU states.

layer8 4y ago
The EU actually has some open source programs, see for example https://github.com/ConnectingEurope https://github.com/ConnectingEurope.

didip 4y ago

I hope this apply to patents as well. There are too many drug research funded by the public but the IP ended up owned by private companies.

4khilles 4y ago
Is this a case where 100% of a research effort is publicly funded or more like 10%? If it's closer to 10%, why would a company take the risk of putting up 90% of the capital when they can just wait for their competitor's IP to become public? Maybe the duration of a patent should depend on how much public funding was received.

inChargeOfIT 4y ago

The US is getting better about it, some more than others, but a few off the top of my head.. https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs https://github.com/nationalsecurityagency https://github.com/nationalsecurityagency https://github.com/GSA https://github.com/GSA https://github.com/CMSgov https://github.com/CMSgov https://github.com/CDCgov https://github.com/CDCgov

toomanybeersies 4y ago
You missed the 18F Github org [1], also from the GSA. I wonder if there's a directory of government Github orgs somewhere? [1] https://github.com/18F https://github.com/18F
- prepend 4y ago
  Yes, there’s https://government.github.com/community/ https://government.github.com/community/ And GSA keeps a list, sort of, of all the US gov projects at code.gsa.gov. But the code activity got defunded a year or two ago and no longer updates a consolidated catalog and now just points to all the various departments.
cmutel 4y ago
https://github.com/USEPA/ https://github.com/USEPA/
prepend 4y ago
Funny story about CDCgov. Probably the most common question we get is “you should use CDC instead of CDCgov.” Someone else has @CDC as they got there first. They aren’t active so CDC tried to get in touch with them and GitHub doesn’t provide a way to contact people. That’s kind of nice actually, they respect privacy. GitHub did offer to contact the user without sharing the users contact info. They asked if @CDC was active and if not, would they mind letting CDC.gov use it. The user responded that they are active, just not with public activity. And that they would like to keep it. I thought the whole process was pretty nice. Github respected the user, and still tried to help. User considered and didn’t change their existing account. Some people got upset and tried to formulate plans to “make” the user give it up, but those weren’t pursued because it would be wrong and a waste of efforts and, I think, harmful to the purpose for collaborative software. So that’s how CDCgov exists. And I suspect there’s a similar story behind CMSgov and all the other sites where staff were too slow to set stuff up.

bumper_crop 4y ago

Suppose you are on a committee where you are evaluating 3 different offers to build a website for your city. Bid A is for $10m, Bid B is for $9.5m, and Bid C is for $9m. The company that made offer B knows that they will likely lose the contract so they counter. "If you let us keep the source code and it remains private, we will bid $8.5m for the contract". Since all three vendors are offering equivalent service, and vendor B is offering a hefty $500,000 discount, how can you reasonably spend far more or your city's money? That money could have gone to improve schools or roads or make more competitive offers for city employees. How can you justify spending a half million more on software principle when there are other more pressing needs? Expecting software to be open source is nice when there is an army of 10s of thousands of FAANG employees to constantly keep it up to date, but less so when there's limited people. Sure, it hypothetically could be kept up to date by the generous and capable people of the city after the fact, but that's farfetched. It isn't realistic or practical for a budget-conscious software company to open them selves up to scrutiny, participate in the open source community, accept bug fixes, do code reviews from strangers, etc. It's more expensive to do OSS, not less. (As an example, the Linux Kernel is mainly made by large companies with lots of expensive employees. Pick your 10 favorite GitHub project with more than 10k stars and see who the primary contributors are.)

rasulkireev 4y ago
Well, making it open source is not the same as making regular citizens/programmers to work on it. You still pay the company to develop and maintain the software. Same way as open source developers get "sponsored". The reason is that anyone who wants to see the code and suggest on how to make it better, or to report a bug, then that would be possible. Furthermore, that work can be reused by other parts of the government. That last point is why some companies wouldn't want to do it, or would charge more. However, to your point, I think the increased cost is worth it in this case. Sure, there are going to be less better roads/schools by 500k, but the problem with that money is that there are rarely big projects for that amount, so it's not like they would be put to best use without being "lost" in the process of relocation.
8note 4y ago
Who will do the maintaining on the closed website though? One company has a monopoly on the support

squinta 4y ago

Italian Digital public administration code (CAD - Codice amministrazione digitale, art. 68 and 69) requires software created with public money to be open sourced and made accessible for reuse by everyone. https://developers.italia.it/en/reuse https://developers.italia.it/en/reuse Formerly it was accessible only to other public administrations. That provision didn't generate any meaningful outcomes as it was not avalable to other developers, just to public administrations in-house developers. With the last reform of the CAD in 2016, it was open to everyone and development of digital public services accelerated.

sublimefire 4y ago

Interesting comments throughout but.. - Selling to public sector is a costly and lengthy process. Not to mention the lack of competence from the public sector partners. - Usually, the money is made by making sure the entity will subscribe for as long as possible, and it should be possible to repackage the same software and sell to somebody else with little effort. - Open sourcing puts the company into a position where it's own code could be reused by the competitor without investing as much. - Furthermore, the projects are usually short lived due to the nature of procurement, budgeting and changing regulations. - It is a risky business that requires complicated solutions to complicated problems, not much of it is reusable outside of the specific domain. I was developing such software for years. Better ask yourself why huge IT departments are doing barely anything despite their funding.

softgrow 4y ago

I greatly appreciated the source code (probably FORTRAN) that I found in a university library in the late 80's. I seem to remember a book of microfiche with many basic algorithm's published on the basis that it was developed with US government with federal money and hence needed to published. So as an Australian I was very grateful for the implementation of Hungarian method (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_algorithm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_algorithm) that I used to write a Turbo-Pascal implementation for rostering problems. Anyone remember the name of the book/folder and the publisher?

softgrow 4y ago
Actually had the source code still kicking around on my laptop and it had a comment {ACSM Algorithm 415} which I think means, Communications of the ACM, Volume 14, Issue 12, Dec. 1971 pp 805–806 https://doi.org/10.1145/362919.362948 https://doi.org/10.1145/362919.362948 , its Pascal-ish pseudo-code with jumps/labels. So maybe the ACM was being generous not the US government.

Dracophoenix 4y ago

This would be a perfect motto for property tax assessments. It is ridiculous that no one has any idea if the value of their home is inflated/deflated by software or reflects a consistent correlation with a measurable value.

prepend 4y ago
My county purchased a service that automatically estimated values. It was a black box to them. During my appeal, they weren’t able to describe how it chose to raise property assessments on which properties as it wasn’t done on every house. They wouldn’t even reveal the vendor. They were getting a ton of appeals because they switched from a manual, poorly coordinated process to an automated process powered by a third party. It was very frustrating because the citizen review board accepted the appraiser’s number even though they couldn’t describe the methods and even though I brought dozens of comps showing a lower price and valuation of actual sales. They fixated on the number that the software produced. I think if software should be used like this it needs to be auditable and at least source available, if not foss.

sylware 4y ago

not enough: lean and simple, but able to do a good enough job, open source software/protocols, including SDKs (that exclude de-facto complex syntax languages with their compilers). Off-course the reality of a complete and reasonable functional software stack is actually made of several technical contexts and drawing the complexity lines at the right sweet spots is hard: mistakes will be made, due to the permanent/long-term toxic brain-washing/lobbying of big tech, and they will be "not free" to fix. Big tech wants to make you hard dependent on all their software and servers to create a permanent flow of money, which is much harder/impossible to do with centralized-server-less or local and independant software. Boiling frog strategy: for that, they have huge funding (blackrock/vanguard/etc) in order to make their companies (microsoft/google/etc) super cheap/free for a very long time and to suffocate competition over time which has less cash flow (those funds have thousands of billions of $). They will create server centralized services, with crippled user-side open source software (not really usable without their servers). They call that "software as a service". That said, some of them will manage to keep their "services" free selling user data to brokers and selling ads. The control of user-side software is via open source grotesque and absurde complexity and size: google(blink(~webkit)/geeko) and apple(webkit) based browsers with their compilers. They know only their army of devs can maintain it, and they have enough control to do planned obsolescence there as a bonus. Well, this is not very well explained, but I think it is enough to get the idea.

ksec 4y ago

I like the word Public Code and not Open Source, since modern definition of Open Source requires a community around it. But what license should this Public Code be? GPL like? AGPL? or Apache 2.0 and BSD like?