28 ms·

Public Money, Public Code

431 points by encodedrose 3y ago

tekknik 3y ago
Does this mean Dominion will release their source code?
anon-3988 3y ago
I am fully in support of such initiative. So I am interested to hear what the possible downsides are? Please share your opinions on the matter as I can only see upsides to this.
- NegativeLatency 3y ago
  I suspect many stakeholders would not like their dirty laundry aired so publicly, which is an obvious good outcome for most people but not the heads of departments and large consulting companies that get big contracts.
  - l0b0 3y ago
    Maybe we'd finally be able to tell which consulting companies actually output decent software, if any.
    - sam_lowry_ 3y ago
      none?
- GabeIsko 3y ago
  I am in support of it too, ultimately, but after working on federal government software projects, it is a very huge uphill battle. Consider this: your trying to build a grants management system for Defense contractors in Afghanistan. You want to make sure that public money is not going to terrorists sanctioned by the US government. There is a forensic accounting software platform widely used by firms that audit the banking industry,but it is closed source and sold to firms commercially. Should the government spend money on making new software or license the existing software that works extremely well? Should the configuration for what the government creates on that software be open to the public, and open to competitors to imitate? Should they demand that the source code is released? Also what about national security? Would AWS release all their source code to retain their largest customer, the US government? I agree that the amount of closed source software used in government projects is staggering and a legitimate barrier to government IT working properly. But the broken process that governments spend money is a bureaucratic nightmare. I am not sure their would be technical downsides, but absolutely their are political ones. The only thing that I could imagine being an actual downside is the retention of confidential information in the interest of national security or public trust. That is a political minefield already, and open source code can help with security, so I don't even think that is the largest hurdle.
  - burnished 3y ago
    Seems like in your example they should make or buy as they see best fit, but if they make they should make it public. If it could conceivably be a military secret then I expect it would be exempt. I don't see anything about copyleft style policies here which you seem to be referencing heavily, where are you getting that from?
    - GabeIsko 3y ago
      But that is how the government operates - what is the point of requiring the government to have all the software they develop be open source when they are contracting out all software development to contractors that develop on proprietary platforms? It's not like the government is hiring software engineers in a meaningful capacity, at least not the US government.
      - burnished 3y ago
        I don't know what to tell you (tried and failed to get a number for programmers employed by the USG, its enough that they have a reputation for not paying as well as private sector), but it sounds like you made up a requirement and got mad about it?
        GabeIsko 3y ago
        I'm not mad. But if your goal is to open source code and software developed with taxpayer money, its not as straightforward as this initiative makes it out to be.
  - bombolo 3y ago
    > Would AWS release all their source code to retain their largest customer, the US government? Yes. Companies would comply with whatever requirement to have the US government as a customer.
    - GabeIsko 3y ago
- sam_lowry_ 3y ago
  The downside is public shame. Governmrnt code is no worse than private code and is usually of very low quality and hints at tought organisational problems and outright fraud.
- lotsoweiners 3y ago
  I’ve been employed as a software developer for my state for almost 2 decades and just wonder what software should be included. I would guess 75% of what I develop is internal services and intranet garbage. The rest is one off tools full of garbage code and hardcoded credentials. Should other divisions that are also publicly funded also have their work available to the public? Perhaps HR should have a GitHub repo for all of their communications?
- nivenkos 3y ago
  It takes more effort to make internal code FOSS (i.e. upstreaming changes, protecting internal parts, etc.) - and often very few other people use it or contribute back anyway. I think it'd make more sense as part of a unified effort - like all EU countries agreeing to provide one digital ID service. But that itself is a much bigger issue due to differing levels of digital services, bureaucracy, etc. I still support it though, and donate to FSF Europe every year with my company donation.
- npteljes 3y ago
  For the common folk, there's no downside. For the people in power, more transparency means fewer avenues to exercise control, fewer places to hide activity.
laserbeam 3y ago
There are a lot of good reasons to do this, even if it's just better interop between different branches of the government, all cool. However, you then realize that the military is funded by public money. I'd wager you don't want fighter jet or missile guidance software to be open source. The idea is way too simplistic and lacks nuance.
- tomrod 3y ago
  Civilian agencies would be a start.
- inciampati 3y ago
  To communicate it and receive your commentary it had to be clear and simple. Of course there are caveats, and these are the kind of thing that makes law difficult and complex despite the overall objective being clear and straightforward.
- redox99 3y ago
  > I'd wager you don't want fighter jet or missile guidance software to be open source. I'd be OK with that.
  - edrxty 3y ago
    When you consider that many guided missiles are, in fact, fully autonomous AI robots that chase and kill people, damn straight.
    - askvictor 3y ago
      The software isn't that difficult part though.
  - dayjaby 3y ago
    DIY missiles incoming.
    - bombolo 3y ago
krupan 3y ago
There will be ignorant arguments against this due to cyber security concerns, enemy nations benefiting from the code, the copyrights of the people/companies who are being paid to write the code, etc., etc.
- metadaemon 3y ago
  I can't tell if this is sarcasm or genuine sentiment.
  - krupan 3y ago
    100% genuine. I don't like that this will happen, but I believe it will.
charcircuit 3y ago
The video says that it's accurate that every night proprietary software is stealing citizen's healthcare data and that the solution is for the government to locate all of the software it needs from scratch and open source it. Why stop at rebuilding all software from scratch? You will also want to rebuild computers from scratch, light bulbs from scratch, etc. The government doesn't need to invent everything from scratch. It can be cheaper and more effective them to buy goods and services from public companies. The website has another message that publically funded software should be open source, but that's not always possible. The government may not have the rights to even do so if they outsourced some of the development. The software is often niche and would not benefit others. In fact it can be a security risk because attackers can look for security vulnerabilities or weaknesses in systems. Attackers have a much bigger insensitive to look for security problems than security researchers because there won't be a bug bounty, it isn't software they personally use, and it could be some rare piece of software no one knows or cares about. If most talented developers are working at private companies, that means that the remaining developers who chose to work for the government are likely more prone to have poor security practices. If attackers know the supply chain of the software they can attack it. If these are open source in the sense they take contributions attackers can contribute vulnerabilities. Open sourcing code is also extra work that has to be done and will make the software more expensive to make and maintain. >Tax savings >Similar applications don't have to be programmed from scratch every time Buying existing software means you don't have to program it from scratch. Sharing projects with other agencies doesn't require open source. >Collaboration >Major projects can share expertise and costs. This doesn't require open source either. The government if they didn't have an income stream from leaching off it's population would be incentivized to figure this out. >Serving the public >Applications paid by the public should be available for everyone. Most of the software will be useless to the public. >Fostering innovation >With transparent processes, others don't have to reinvent the wheel. This is just the collaboration point. The government isn't innovative in the software field.
- richbell 3y ago
  > If most talented developers are working private companies, that means that the remaining developers who chose to work for the government are likely more prone to have poor security practices. This is a fallacious logic. > Open sourcing code is also extra work that has to be done and will make the software more expensive to make and maintain. Not if there is an established standard and practice of writing code in an open source way.
sensecall 3y ago
UK and Australian Governments manage to do this, at least to a certain extent: https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/technology/making-source-code-open-and-reusable https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/technology/making-source-c... https://www.dta.gov.au/help-and-advice/digital-service-standard/digital-service-standard-criteria/8-make-source-code-open https://www.dta.gov.au/help-and-advice/digital-service-stand...
- JenrHywy 3y ago
  The vast majority of code written the for Australian government is, and I think will remain, closed, though there's certainly support for contributing to or publishing open source. But the reality is, most government software isn't particularly interesting, and what is would most likely not be approved to be open sourced.
mdmglr 3y ago
There are already processes in place to make code developed from tax payer funded R&D available to American companies with a licensing agreement. To protect my anonymity I cannot elaborate more.
majormajor 3y ago
The point where it always breaks down for me is that I've never seen anyone lobby for moving more in the "VC Money, VC Code" direction. Labor has value and needs rewarding, not just capital.
- geysersam 3y ago
  I don't understand the argument. Municipalities / counties have many common software needs. If they collaborated on open source software we would likely get higher quality services at lower cost, what's bad about that?
  - ketzu 3y ago
    Is them cooperating on open source software a realistic outcome? Or will there be many small, unmaintainable, slightly different, open projects? Why are they not already collaborating on closed source software? Looking at the mess of customizations asked for software by companies doing the same thing, I can't imagine it would be different for counties/municipalities. (edit: Please don't misunderstand, I am not against publicly funded open source, I am just not sure if all the arguments for it hold up that well)
    - npteljes 3y ago
      They are currently using closed sourced software, because it was sold to them, on god knows what terms, and how many people paid off. As with many other things in life, it's not about the thing itself, but about the people involved.
    - geysersam 3y ago
      If they collaborated today that would mean a lot of active coordination required. And only municipalities in the collaboration can benefit. If they just open sourced what they have this collaboration could grow more organically. Of course large scale software collaboration isn't impossible without open source. But my impression is that it greatly simplifies it. Besides, if the software is open source, other non public actors can also benefit from it.
Proven 3y ago
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moremetadata 3y ago
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deleted 3y ago
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transpute 3y ago
https://code.gov/ https://code.gov/ Sharing America's Code Unlock the tremendous potential of the Federal Government’s software. Code.gov is the federal government's platform for sharing America's open source software. Our mission is to help agency partners and developers save money and increase quality by promoting code reuse and educating and connecting the open source community. https://www.nextgov.com/it-modernization/2018/02/defense-department-relaunches-open-source-software-portal/146061/ https://www.nextgov.com/it-modernization/2018/02/defense-dep... > In 2016, then-President Barack Obama’s Federal Source Code Policy pushed agencies to use open source software. Among other things, the policy included a pilot program requiring agencies to publish 20 percent of code written by the government. https://code.mil/ https://code.mil/ > The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) faces unique challenges in open sourcing its code. Unlike most software projects, code written by U.S. Federal government employees typically does not have copyright protections under U.S. and some international laws. This can make it difficult to attach an open source license to our code. The Defense Digital Service (DDS) has been working with DoD and the open source community since early 2017 to develop a guideline for supporting open source software (OSS) within the Department. U.S. DoD Open-Source Software FAQ (2021), https://dodcio.defense.gov/Open-Source-Software-FAQ/ https://dodcio.defense.gov/Open-Source-Software-FAQ/ > This page is an educational resource for government employees and government contractors to understand the policies and legal issues relating to the use of open source software (OSS) in the United States Department of Defense (DoD). David Wheeler (now at Linux Foundation working on software supply chain security via OpenSSF), "Open-Source and the Department of Defense" (2009), https://dwheeler.com/essays/dod-oss.pdf https://dwheeler.com/essays/dod-oss.pdf DoD memo “Clarifying Guidance Regarding OSS” (Oct 16, 2009) OSS is commercial, commercial must be preferred DoD must develop/update capabilities faster; OSS advantages Source code is “data” per DODD 8320.02; must share in DoD DoD-developed software should be released to the public under certain conditions
grammers 3y ago
This is one of the best initiatives to promote open source. We should all support it as much as possible - particularly if working in IT. If you are: Keep in mind you are making the decisions & you can decide for better options than Google & Microsoft!
anonymous344 3y ago
this has always puzzled me. Companies gets millions from the taxpayers to certain projects to develop their (something) Then another company get another million to develop same or similiar thing. Why it is not a required that if you get taxpayers' money, the results should be available for free to everyone, let's say after 12 months of grace perioid ??
- anonymous344 3y ago
  and the worst: taxpayers' 99% funded organizations for example for traveling or some other area make the same sh*t as another orgs already did 3 times, yet they do not share any of the information.
- bombolo 3y ago
  The extra money is needed to corrupt the people doing procurement…
- JellyBeanThief 3y ago
  Because that would be bad for society. It's important that money moves around as much as possible--every time it does, value is created. Think of it like the water cycle. By increasing the output of the sun (enacting laws to keep publicly-funded code private), we cause lots more money to evaporate from the taxpayer oceans (by solving the same problem repeatedly), and that in turn creates lots more fiscalonimbus clouds in the upper ten percentosphere (where you can find, e.g., large consulting businesses and shareholders). Before long, all that evaporated money (it's actually stock now, the most interesting property of which is that its value expands and contracts to fit whatever everyone thinks it should be worth) will start to precipitate when it's liquidated again, see? From there it rains on unspecified economic mountains and valleys, and eventually trickles back down into the ocean again. You might point out that increasing the output of the sun in the real world actually result in a scorched, uninhabitable earth, and that also that's not how any of this works but hey, no analogy is perfect. And this one is plenty good enough to convince voters.
  - 76SlashDolphin 3y ago
starefossen 3y ago
The largest branch of the Norwegian government, Labor and Welfare Administration (NAV), have adopted this this policy since 2018 and now we have over 2000 public repositories on https://github.com/navikt https://github.com/navikt and https://github.com/nais https://github.com/nais (last one is our platform organization)
- jWhick 3y ago
  Way to go Norway
- asdfman123 3y ago
  What if we, and hear me out, just stole Norway’s code? /a
  - nicbou 3y ago
    Just comment out healthcare and a couple of other things and you’re good to go! In reality though it would be possible to share code between cities, regions and even countries. Some use cases are fairly generic.
    - asdfman123 3y ago
      It’s an application for a CMS, but they probably already have them. Local newspapers, for instance, use CMSes too but there’s still a lot of random bespoke work that goes into them.
  - sitkack 3y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joel_Pett https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joel_Pett https://i.imgur.com/up6yu.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/up6yu.jpeg
- NoPain 3y ago
  I think we also celebrate with cake if someone have a pull request from someone else that get approved?
isoos 3y ago
Also: public money, public data. One can dream....
- hnbad 3y ago
  Whether you want all data the government has to be public depends heavily on whether you want private security forces to have all the same power as a police force.
pcthrowaway 3y ago
The province of British Columbia appears to have a massive open source presence: https://github.com/bcgov https://github.com/bcgov
nicbou 3y ago
I’ve heard those exact words from a government developer in Berlin and it felt really good to hear. Imagine making pull requests to improve government services! Some people would gladly do it.
- knallfrosch 3y ago
  Imagine getting 10,000 pull requests and 7 originate from KGB hackers that solve a real problem but contain a vulnerability.
  - nagisa 3y ago
    Why bother when KGB hackers can already find a dozen of vulnerabilities just by looking sideways at a closed source project built by the most well-meaning team?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - nivenkos 3y ago
    Wow, even using "Russians under the bed" to attack FOSS now.
    - heywhatupboys 3y ago
      even worse, we know for a fact all the shit the NSA did to our software, but muh spoopy russians instead
  - atoav 3y ago
    Imagine contracting a company and their programmer is a KGB hacker and nobody is ever allowed to see the source code.
    - Lex-2008 3y ago
      that's true, but, to be fair, it might be easier to order an anti-hacker CIA background check for a contracted company of 100+ employees, than for a 10,000 pseudo-anonymous github users.
amadeuspagel 3y ago
This website should start with an explanation of what free software is. Yes there's a link, most people won't click on it and assume that it means "free as in beer".
sylware 3y ago
Public money, public open source and lean code. Don't forget "open source" is not enough anymore, and "open source" can be private between a coder and its users, not public (that's why it is fine with defense related work). I don't want public information systems to be dependent on open source bloat and kludge.
irusensei 3y ago
I wish my home country current mindset wasn't that just suggesting that certain government code should be published as open source will paint you as a far right conspiracionist who doubts and attacks democracy. Yeah it's Brazil. I remember a long decade spanning thread about the Brazilian government trying to shoehorn their super ca root into Mozilla cert database. Lots of arguments like "we audit ourselves and cherry pick a very strict number of academics to see our code and security methodologies".
bjackman 3y ago
I am in favour of the principle and certainly wouldn't oppose such legislation. However I think it's worth being aware that publishing and licensing the code only gets you an open-source project in the most narrow sense. To actually get meaningful benefit from it you need to design it with multiple use-cases and deployment models in mind, document it, and build a community around it. If you have a bunch of publicly-funded teams that are desperate to do that work but held back by rules saying their code has to be private then forcing it public is a huge win. But actually I think most such teams are just trying to get their project off the ground or keep it alive. If you make them publish the code they'll do so and then carry on developing an undocumented system that solves their exact usecase and none other, and is tightly coupled to their particular production environment. I think to really get open-source happening successfully you actually need to foster a culture that values and incentivises the extra work it entails. Nonetheless, this would be a great first step. So bravo!
classified 3y ago
Every European should sign this. Are there similar efforts in the U.S.?
kulikalov 3y ago
How about Public Money, Public Data? For instance, there’s a whole industry around finding public legal information about companies. State’s websites offer throttled database access, some offer data for free, but most selling it for dozens of thousands of dollars (officially)
- robinwassen 3y ago
  Public data is not always that nice. In Sweden most government data is public which includes individuals tax records. That generates things such as news articles "The 50 people in your area that had the highest income last year" with home address and everything and that you can look up income instantly on the web. Some level of privacy for this would be nice to have.
- BiteCode_dev 3y ago
  There should be a fee, but a fee equal to how much storage and access cost, so a very small one. If you put no fee, some big actors will create non optimize crawlers and call the service in a loop, wasting your tax money. A small fee means people will take care of only get exactly the data they need, cache what they need to cache, and refresh only if they really need to, and what they really need to. Otherwise, it's the tragedy of the common.
- jksk61 3y ago
  italy does: both dataset and public websites, but it's italy and the list is more incomplete than not. see https://github.com/italia https://github.com/italia
SergeAx 3y ago
Italy has https://developers.italia.it/en/software https://developers.italia.it/en/software exactly for that. I admire that project.
neilsimp1 3y ago
What could possibly be the arguments against this sort of thing? Public money => Public code seems obvious to me.
spapas82 3y ago
There are four reasons this is difficult to actually work: A. Most people in government positions don't know/care about open source. Nobody will educate them for the following reasons. B. Most private implementors don't want to open source stuff because it will make easier for other companies to study their code, making it easy for them to get contracts for updates to that code. Avoiding open source in general also increases the total cost so more profit for the implementing party (fe selling also Oracle licenses is much better than using postgresql) C. Code in the open is easier to be audited by hackers for exploits. This is even more problematic because government code is supported by private contracts and may be left unsopported for some time due to bureaucracy. D. This is the most important. Open sourcing projects opens the door for cost auditing. We've seen crazy things like simple CMSs costing millions of euros. Although these may be simple wordpress sites, they get away with them because they can say that they are custom implemented, have huge back office etc. Open sourcing them will reveal the scam. Source: I work in a public sector organisation in an EU country and have dealt many times with projects by outside contractors.
- pms 3y ago
  You point out that things are not as they should be and argue that changing them will be hard, because that's how they are... to me, these points are a great motivation to introduce the legislature: A. Such initiatives make government aware of the value of open-source systems to the public. B. Ok, then this legislature would contribute to the reduction of inequality. C. Better to fix bugs early than wait until they have catastrophic consequences. D. Are you saying that we should let bad things continue happening?
  - spapas82 3y ago
    A. Few people outside of tech care; this won't bring votes. B. Yes but the private contractors like the current status quo. More profit for them. C. It's not always possible. Bureaucracy is a very big factor in such cases and it can't be fixed. D. Of course not. The thing is that there are a lot of people that "profit" from this situation. And unfortunately these are more or less the same people that can decide in favour of making the open source everything move. And because of A there won't be much pressure for changes.
nfriedly 3y ago
The U.S. Digital Service (USDS) has a number of open source repos: https://github.com/usds https://github.com/usds I don't think it's everything they work on, but it's a step in the right direction.
gampleman 3y ago
I think there should be some important balance in this: 1. What exactly do we mean by open source here? Some of the benefits would even come with a source-available model. Others would need actual permissive licensing. 2. Some public sector funding is strategic in the sense that the government wants to fund developments in some particular sector of the economy to help bootstrap the strategic industry (for instance the space sector in the UK works a lot like this). In this case its not clear what advantage there would be in mandatory open sourcing... But perhaps say you can keep it closed for 12 months after the end of the funding, then mandatory open sourcing? Gives a 12 month head start seems generous enough. 3. There is a reasonable argument when bidding on a contract where a vendor says: we won't implement this from scratch, but we will fund this by selling the same solution to other customers, and as such we can deliver this cheaper than other bidders but only as closed source. This seems valid (i.e. its a build vs buy decision essentially) and I think government organisations that have real budgets will need to make these tradeoffs occasionally. But perhaps there should be a mandated minimum discount that needs to be achieved (i.e. we're willing to pay 25% more for an open source solution, if you can't outbid that then we are obliged to choose a more expensive but open source supplier).
specialist 3y ago
Terrific. I like it. Talking points are spot on. FWIW, I've used the term "citizen-owned software" for the same concept. On the stump, every one just grokked "citizen-owned software". 15 years ago, I ran for office, advocating election integrity ("private voting, public counting"). Including replacing COTS with FOSS. My audiences were donors, politicos, editorial boards, and lots and lots of normal people. Explaining "FOSS" was a non-starter, so I switched to "citizen-owned software", which needed no explaining. Happy hunting.
stefantalpalaru 3y ago
[dead]

431 points by encodedrose 3y ago

Does this mean Dominion will release their source code?

I am fully in support of such initiative. So I am interested to hear what the possible downsides are? Please share your opinions on the matter as I can only see upsides to this.

NegativeLatency 3y ago
I suspect many stakeholders would not like their dirty laundry aired so publicly, which is an obvious good outcome for most people but not the heads of departments and large consulting companies that get big contracts.
- l0b0 3y ago
  Maybe we'd finally be able to tell which consulting companies actually output decent software, if any.
  - sam_lowry_ 3y ago
    none?
GabeIsko 3y ago
I am in support of it too, ultimately, but after working on federal government software projects, it is a very huge uphill battle. Consider this: your trying to build a grants management system for Defense contractors in Afghanistan. You want to make sure that public money is not going to terrorists sanctioned by the US government. There is a forensic accounting software platform widely used by firms that audit the banking industry,but it is closed source and sold to firms commercially. Should the government spend money on making new software or license the existing software that works extremely well? Should the configuration for what the government creates on that software be open to the public, and open to competitors to imitate? Should they demand that the source code is released? Also what about national security? Would AWS release all their source code to retain their largest customer, the US government? I agree that the amount of closed source software used in government projects is staggering and a legitimate barrier to government IT working properly. But the broken process that governments spend money is a bureaucratic nightmare. I am not sure their would be technical downsides, but absolutely their are political ones. The only thing that I could imagine being an actual downside is the retention of confidential information in the interest of national security or public trust. That is a political minefield already, and open source code can help with security, so I don't even think that is the largest hurdle.
- burnished 3y ago
  Seems like in your example they should make or buy as they see best fit, but if they make they should make it public. If it could conceivably be a military secret then I expect it would be exempt. I don't see anything about copyleft style policies here which you seem to be referencing heavily, where are you getting that from?
  - GabeIsko 3y ago
    But that is how the government operates - what is the point of requiring the government to have all the software they develop be open source when they are contracting out all software development to contractors that develop on proprietary platforms? It's not like the government is hiring software engineers in a meaningful capacity, at least not the US government.
    - burnished 3y ago
      I don't know what to tell you (tried and failed to get a number for programmers employed by the USG, its enough that they have a reputation for not paying as well as private sector), but it sounds like you made up a requirement and got mad about it?
      - GabeIsko 3y ago
        I'm not mad. But if your goal is to open source code and software developed with taxpayer money, its not as straightforward as this initiative makes it out to be.
- bombolo 3y ago
  > Would AWS release all their source code to retain their largest customer, the US government? Yes. Companies would comply with whatever requirement to have the US government as a customer.
  - GabeIsko 3y ago
sam_lowry_ 3y ago
The downside is public shame. Governmrnt code is no worse than private code and is usually of very low quality and hints at tought organisational problems and outright fraud.
lotsoweiners 3y ago
I’ve been employed as a software developer for my state for almost 2 decades and just wonder what software should be included. I would guess 75% of what I develop is internal services and intranet garbage. The rest is one off tools full of garbage code and hardcoded credentials. Should other divisions that are also publicly funded also have their work available to the public? Perhaps HR should have a GitHub repo for all of their communications?
nivenkos 3y ago
It takes more effort to make internal code FOSS (i.e. upstreaming changes, protecting internal parts, etc.) - and often very few other people use it or contribute back anyway. I think it'd make more sense as part of a unified effort - like all EU countries agreeing to provide one digital ID service. But that itself is a much bigger issue due to differing levels of digital services, bureaucracy, etc. I still support it though, and donate to FSF Europe every year with my company donation.
npteljes 3y ago
For the common folk, there's no downside. For the people in power, more transparency means fewer avenues to exercise control, fewer places to hide activity.

laserbeam 3y ago

There are a lot of good reasons to do this, even if it's just better interop between different branches of the government, all cool. However, you then realize that the military is funded by public money. I'd wager you don't want fighter jet or missile guidance software to be open source. The idea is way too simplistic and lacks nuance.

tomrod 3y ago
Civilian agencies would be a start.
inciampati 3y ago
To communicate it and receive your commentary it had to be clear and simple. Of course there are caveats, and these are the kind of thing that makes law difficult and complex despite the overall objective being clear and straightforward.
redox99 3y ago
> I'd wager you don't want fighter jet or missile guidance software to be open source. I'd be OK with that.
- edrxty 3y ago
  When you consider that many guided missiles are, in fact, fully autonomous AI robots that chase and kill people, damn straight.
  - askvictor 3y ago
    The software isn't that difficult part though.
- dayjaby 3y ago
  DIY missiles incoming.
  - bombolo 3y ago

krupan 3y ago

There will be ignorant arguments against this due to cyber security concerns, enemy nations benefiting from the code, the copyrights of the people/companies who are being paid to write the code, etc., etc.

metadaemon 3y ago
I can't tell if this is sarcasm or genuine sentiment.
- krupan 3y ago
  100% genuine. I don't like that this will happen, but I believe it will.

charcircuit 3y ago

The video says that it's accurate that every night proprietary software is stealing citizen's healthcare data and that the solution is for the government to locate all of the software it needs from scratch and open source it. Why stop at rebuilding all software from scratch? You will also want to rebuild computers from scratch, light bulbs from scratch, etc. The government doesn't need to invent everything from scratch. It can be cheaper and more effective them to buy goods and services from public companies. The website has another message that publically funded software should be open source, but that's not always possible. The government may not have the rights to even do so if they outsourced some of the development. The software is often niche and would not benefit others. In fact it can be a security risk because attackers can look for security vulnerabilities or weaknesses in systems. Attackers have a much bigger insensitive to look for security problems than security researchers because there won't be a bug bounty, it isn't software they personally use, and it could be some rare piece of software no one knows or cares about. If most talented developers are working at private companies, that means that the remaining developers who chose to work for the government are likely more prone to have poor security practices. If attackers know the supply chain of the software they can attack it. If these are open source in the sense they take contributions attackers can contribute vulnerabilities. Open sourcing code is also extra work that has to be done and will make the software more expensive to make and maintain. >Tax savings >Similar applications don't have to be programmed from scratch every time Buying existing software means you don't have to program it from scratch. Sharing projects with other agencies doesn't require open source. >Collaboration >Major projects can share expertise and costs. This doesn't require open source either. The government if they didn't have an income stream from leaching off it's population would be incentivized to figure this out. >Serving the public >Applications paid by the public should be available for everyone. Most of the software will be useless to the public. >Fostering innovation >With transparent processes, others don't have to reinvent the wheel. This is just the collaboration point. The government isn't innovative in the software field.

richbell 3y ago
> If most talented developers are working private companies, that means that the remaining developers who chose to work for the government are likely more prone to have poor security practices. This is a fallacious logic. > Open sourcing code is also extra work that has to be done and will make the software more expensive to make and maintain. Not if there is an established standard and practice of writing code in an open source way.

sensecall 3y ago

UK and Australian Governments manage to do this, at least to a certain extent: https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/technology/making-source-code-open-and-reusable https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/technology/making-source-c... https://www.dta.gov.au/help-and-advice/digital-service-standard/digital-service-standard-criteria/8-make-source-code-open https://www.dta.gov.au/help-and-advice/digital-service-stand...

JenrHywy 3y ago
The vast majority of code written the for Australian government is, and I think will remain, closed, though there's certainly support for contributing to or publishing open source. But the reality is, most government software isn't particularly interesting, and what is would most likely not be approved to be open sourced.

mdmglr 3y ago

There are already processes in place to make code developed from tax payer funded R&D available to American companies with a licensing agreement. To protect my anonymity I cannot elaborate more.

majormajor 3y ago

The point where it always breaks down for me is that I've never seen anyone lobby for moving more in the "VC Money, VC Code" direction. Labor has value and needs rewarding, not just capital.

geysersam 3y ago
I don't understand the argument. Municipalities / counties have many common software needs. If they collaborated on open source software we would likely get higher quality services at lower cost, what's bad about that?
- ketzu 3y ago
  Is them cooperating on open source software a realistic outcome? Or will there be many small, unmaintainable, slightly different, open projects? Why are they not already collaborating on closed source software? Looking at the mess of customizations asked for software by companies doing the same thing, I can't imagine it would be different for counties/municipalities. (edit: Please don't misunderstand, I am not against publicly funded open source, I am just not sure if all the arguments for it hold up that well)
  - npteljes 3y ago
    They are currently using closed sourced software, because it was sold to them, on god knows what terms, and how many people paid off. As with many other things in life, it's not about the thing itself, but about the people involved.
  - geysersam 3y ago
    If they collaborated today that would mean a lot of active coordination required. And only municipalities in the collaboration can benefit. If they just open sourced what they have this collaboration could grow more organically. Of course large scale software collaboration isn't impossible without open source. But my impression is that it greatly simplifies it. Besides, if the software is open source, other non public actors can also benefit from it.

Proven 3y ago

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transpute 3y ago

https://code.gov/ https://code.gov/ Sharing America's Code Unlock the tremendous potential of the Federal Government’s software. Code.gov is the federal government's platform for sharing America's open source software. Our mission is to help agency partners and developers save money and increase quality by promoting code reuse and educating and connecting the open source community. https://www.nextgov.com/it-modernization/2018/02/defense-department-relaunches-open-source-software-portal/146061/ https://www.nextgov.com/it-modernization/2018/02/defense-dep... > In 2016, then-President Barack Obama’s Federal Source Code Policy pushed agencies to use open source software. Among other things, the policy included a pilot program requiring agencies to publish 20 percent of code written by the government. https://code.mil/ https://code.mil/ > The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) faces unique challenges in open sourcing its code. Unlike most software projects, code written by U.S. Federal government employees typically does not have copyright protections under U.S. and some international laws. This can make it difficult to attach an open source license to our code. The Defense Digital Service (DDS) has been working with DoD and the open source community since early 2017 to develop a guideline for supporting open source software (OSS) within the Department. U.S. DoD Open-Source Software FAQ (2021), https://dodcio.defense.gov/Open-Source-Software-FAQ/ https://dodcio.defense.gov/Open-Source-Software-FAQ/ > This page is an educational resource for government employees and government contractors to understand the policies and legal issues relating to the use of open source software (OSS) in the United States Department of Defense (DoD). David Wheeler (now at Linux Foundation working on software supply chain security via OpenSSF), "Open-Source and the Department of Defense" (2009), https://dwheeler.com/essays/dod-oss.pdf https://dwheeler.com/essays/dod-oss.pdf DoD memo “Clarifying Guidance Regarding OSS” (Oct 16, 2009) OSS is commercial, commercial must be preferred DoD must develop/update capabilities faster; OSS advantages Source code is “data” per DODD 8320.02; must share in DoD DoD-developed software should be released to the public under certain conditions

grammers 3y ago

This is one of the best initiatives to promote open source. We should all support it as much as possible - particularly if working in IT. If you are: Keep in mind you are making the decisions & you can decide for better options than Google & Microsoft!

anonymous344 3y ago

this has always puzzled me. Companies gets millions from the taxpayers to certain projects to develop their (something) Then another company get another million to develop same or similiar thing. Why it is not a required that if you get taxpayers' money, the results should be available for free to everyone, let's say after 12 months of grace perioid ??

anonymous344 3y ago
and the worst: taxpayers' 99% funded organizations for example for traveling or some other area make the same sh*t as another orgs already did 3 times, yet they do not share any of the information.
bombolo 3y ago
The extra money is needed to corrupt the people doing procurement…
JellyBeanThief 3y ago
Because that would be bad for society. It's important that money moves around as much as possible--every time it does, value is created. Think of it like the water cycle. By increasing the output of the sun (enacting laws to keep publicly-funded code private), we cause lots more money to evaporate from the taxpayer oceans (by solving the same problem repeatedly), and that in turn creates lots more fiscalonimbus clouds in the upper ten percentosphere (where you can find, e.g., large consulting businesses and shareholders). Before long, all that evaporated money (it's actually stock now, the most interesting property of which is that its value expands and contracts to fit whatever everyone thinks it should be worth) will start to precipitate when it's liquidated again, see? From there it rains on unspecified economic mountains and valleys, and eventually trickles back down into the ocean again. You might point out that increasing the output of the sun in the real world actually result in a scorched, uninhabitable earth, and that also that's not how any of this works but hey, no analogy is perfect. And this one is plenty good enough to convince voters.
- 76SlashDolphin 3y ago

starefossen 3y ago

The largest branch of the Norwegian government, Labor and Welfare Administration (NAV), have adopted this this policy since 2018 and now we have over 2000 public repositories on https://github.com/navikt https://github.com/navikt and https://github.com/nais https://github.com/nais (last one is our platform organization)

jWhick 3y ago
Way to go Norway
asdfman123 3y ago
What if we, and hear me out, just stole Norway’s code? /a
- nicbou 3y ago
  Just comment out healthcare and a couple of other things and you’re good to go! In reality though it would be possible to share code between cities, regions and even countries. Some use cases are fairly generic.
  - asdfman123 3y ago
    It’s an application for a CMS, but they probably already have them. Local newspapers, for instance, use CMSes too but there’s still a lot of random bespoke work that goes into them.
- sitkack 3y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joel_Pett https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joel_Pett https://i.imgur.com/up6yu.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/up6yu.jpeg
NoPain 3y ago
I think we also celebrate with cake if someone have a pull request from someone else that get approved?

isoos 3y ago

Also: public money, public data. One can dream....

hnbad 3y ago
Whether you want all data the government has to be public depends heavily on whether you want private security forces to have all the same power as a police force.

pcthrowaway 3y ago

The province of British Columbia appears to have a massive open source presence: https://github.com/bcgov https://github.com/bcgov

nicbou 3y ago

I’ve heard those exact words from a government developer in Berlin and it felt really good to hear. Imagine making pull requests to improve government services! Some people would gladly do it.

knallfrosch 3y ago
Imagine getting 10,000 pull requests and 7 originate from KGB hackers that solve a real problem but contain a vulnerability.
- nagisa 3y ago
  Why bother when KGB hackers can already find a dozen of vulnerabilities just by looking sideways at a closed source project built by the most well-meaning team?
- deleted 3y ago
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- nivenkos 3y ago
  Wow, even using "Russians under the bed" to attack FOSS now.
  - heywhatupboys 3y ago
    even worse, we know for a fact all the shit the NSA did to our software, but muh spoopy russians instead
- atoav 3y ago
  Imagine contracting a company and their programmer is a KGB hacker and nobody is ever allowed to see the source code.
  - Lex-2008 3y ago
    that's true, but, to be fair, it might be easier to order an anti-hacker CIA background check for a contracted company of 100+ employees, than for a 10,000 pseudo-anonymous github users.

amadeuspagel 3y ago

This website should start with an explanation of what free software is. Yes there's a link, most people won't click on it and assume that it means "free as in beer".

sylware 3y ago

Public money, public open source and lean code. Don't forget "open source" is not enough anymore, and "open source" can be private between a coder and its users, not public (that's why it is fine with defense related work). I don't want public information systems to be dependent on open source bloat and kludge.

irusensei 3y ago

I wish my home country current mindset wasn't that just suggesting that certain government code should be published as open source will paint you as a far right conspiracionist who doubts and attacks democracy. Yeah it's Brazil. I remember a long decade spanning thread about the Brazilian government trying to shoehorn their super ca root into Mozilla cert database. Lots of arguments like "we audit ourselves and cherry pick a very strict number of academics to see our code and security methodologies".

bjackman 3y ago

I am in favour of the principle and certainly wouldn't oppose such legislation. However I think it's worth being aware that publishing and licensing the code only gets you an open-source project in the most narrow sense. To actually get meaningful benefit from it you need to design it with multiple use-cases and deployment models in mind, document it, and build a community around it. If you have a bunch of publicly-funded teams that are desperate to do that work but held back by rules saying their code has to be private then forcing it public is a huge win. But actually I think most such teams are just trying to get their project off the ground or keep it alive. If you make them publish the code they'll do so and then carry on developing an undocumented system that solves their exact usecase and none other, and is tightly coupled to their particular production environment. I think to really get open-source happening successfully you actually need to foster a culture that values and incentivises the extra work it entails. Nonetheless, this would be a great first step. So bravo!

classified 3y ago

Every European should sign this. Are there similar efforts in the U.S.?

kulikalov 3y ago

How about Public Money, Public Data? For instance, there’s a whole industry around finding public legal information about companies. State’s websites offer throttled database access, some offer data for free, but most selling it for dozens of thousands of dollars (officially)

robinwassen 3y ago
Public data is not always that nice. In Sweden most government data is public which includes individuals tax records. That generates things such as news articles "The 50 people in your area that had the highest income last year" with home address and everything and that you can look up income instantly on the web. Some level of privacy for this would be nice to have.
BiteCode_dev 3y ago
There should be a fee, but a fee equal to how much storage and access cost, so a very small one. If you put no fee, some big actors will create non optimize crawlers and call the service in a loop, wasting your tax money. A small fee means people will take care of only get exactly the data they need, cache what they need to cache, and refresh only if they really need to, and what they really need to. Otherwise, it's the tragedy of the common.
jksk61 3y ago
italy does: both dataset and public websites, but it's italy and the list is more incomplete than not. see https://github.com/italia https://github.com/italia

SergeAx 3y ago

Italy has https://developers.italia.it/en/software https://developers.italia.it/en/software exactly for that. I admire that project.

neilsimp1 3y ago

What could possibly be the arguments against this sort of thing? Public money => Public code seems obvious to me.

spapas82 3y ago

There are four reasons this is difficult to actually work: A. Most people in government positions don't know/care about open source. Nobody will educate them for the following reasons. B. Most private implementors don't want to open source stuff because it will make easier for other companies to study their code, making it easy for them to get contracts for updates to that code. Avoiding open source in general also increases the total cost so more profit for the implementing party (fe selling also Oracle licenses is much better than using postgresql) C. Code in the open is easier to be audited by hackers for exploits. This is even more problematic because government code is supported by private contracts and may be left unsopported for some time due to bureaucracy. D. This is the most important. Open sourcing projects opens the door for cost auditing. We've seen crazy things like simple CMSs costing millions of euros. Although these may be simple wordpress sites, they get away with them because they can say that they are custom implemented, have huge back office etc. Open sourcing them will reveal the scam. Source: I work in a public sector organisation in an EU country and have dealt many times with projects by outside contractors.

pms 3y ago
You point out that things are not as they should be and argue that changing them will be hard, because that's how they are... to me, these points are a great motivation to introduce the legislature: A. Such initiatives make government aware of the value of open-source systems to the public. B. Ok, then this legislature would contribute to the reduction of inequality. C. Better to fix bugs early than wait until they have catastrophic consequences. D. Are you saying that we should let bad things continue happening?
- spapas82 3y ago
  A. Few people outside of tech care; this won't bring votes. B. Yes but the private contractors like the current status quo. More profit for them. C. It's not always possible. Bureaucracy is a very big factor in such cases and it can't be fixed. D. Of course not. The thing is that there are a lot of people that "profit" from this situation. And unfortunately these are more or less the same people that can decide in favour of making the open source everything move. And because of A there won't be much pressure for changes.

nfriedly 3y ago

The U.S. Digital Service (USDS) has a number of open source repos: https://github.com/usds https://github.com/usds I don't think it's everything they work on, but it's a step in the right direction.

gampleman 3y ago

I think there should be some important balance in this: 1. What exactly do we mean by open source here? Some of the benefits would even come with a source-available model. Others would need actual permissive licensing. 2. Some public sector funding is strategic in the sense that the government wants to fund developments in some particular sector of the economy to help bootstrap the strategic industry (for instance the space sector in the UK works a lot like this). In this case its not clear what advantage there would be in mandatory open sourcing... But perhaps say you can keep it closed for 12 months after the end of the funding, then mandatory open sourcing? Gives a 12 month head start seems generous enough. 3. There is a reasonable argument when bidding on a contract where a vendor says: we won't implement this from scratch, but we will fund this by selling the same solution to other customers, and as such we can deliver this cheaper than other bidders but only as closed source. This seems valid (i.e. its a build vs buy decision essentially) and I think government organisations that have real budgets will need to make these tradeoffs occasionally. But perhaps there should be a mandated minimum discount that needs to be achieved (i.e. we're willing to pay 25% more for an open source solution, if you can't outbid that then we are obliged to choose a more expensive but open source supplier).

specialist 3y ago

Terrific. I like it. Talking points are spot on. FWIW, I've used the term "citizen-owned software" for the same concept. On the stump, every one just grokked "citizen-owned software". 15 years ago, I ran for office, advocating election integrity ("private voting, public counting"). Including replacing COTS with FOSS. My audiences were donors, politicos, editorial boards, and lots and lots of normal people. Explaining "FOSS" was a non-starter, so I switched to "citizen-owned software", which needed no explaining. Happy hunting.

stefantalpalaru 3y ago

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