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US government commits to publish publicly financed software under FOSS licenses

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Re: US government commits to publish publicly financed software under FOSS licenses

#71
Obligatory mention of 18F (https://18f.gsa.gov) within the General Services Administration who develop federal government projects in the open (and have defaulted to open-sourcing since their inception).

https://18f.gsa.gov/2015/01/16/open-source-for-good-governme...

Re: US government commits to publish publicly financed software under FOSS licenses

#72
post #23
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might be a reason to long-term require all software used be open source and for that matter make it easy for a user to confirm that the system in use real-time is the system that's open-sourced too.

How do you allow a user to confirm this in real time? Hash displayed on th screen?

Users wouldn't confirm this in in real time just like users have no way of verifying in real time that their paper ballot was actually counted.

A better outcome for this type of system would be a pre-election and post-election verification of each machine (which isn't unreasonable since the number of machines is far less than the number of ballots) in which interested agents from each party/group could be present during the verification process (and use their own machine if they desire) to ensure that all the digital signatures match and there's no foul play.

Re: US government commits to publish publicly financed software under FOSS licenses

#73
post #66
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first two look reasonable, but after that it goes downhill. "The release of the item would create an identifiable risk to the stability, security, or integrity of the agency’s systems or personnel" means "I don't feel like it and you can't make me."

I'm probably misreading it, but "the integrity of the agency's personnel" makes it sound like "the in-house developers wrote terrible code and people will criticize them for it".

Or the stability. Open sourcing certain code may literally lead to insanity! I think this was just poorly word-smithed and the "correct" interpretation would only apply the protection of security to personnel.

Re: US government commits to publish publicly financed software under FOSS licenses

#74
Licensing problems. For new projects this sounds great, put the code either in the public domain or they pick a license. Which one? MIT/BSD, GPL/LGPL, or something else? The former can generally be incorporated into the later, but what if they pick something else that's incompatible? At least we can see what was done and learn from it I guess. And what if they require a particular license as part of the policy and it prevent government projects from extending existing OSS project? That would be a shame.

The intent seems good, but the details will be everything.

Re: US government commits to publish publicly financed software under FOSS licenses

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LOC-based metric tied to money... What could go wrong?

An overabundance of semicolons per line? A complete abandonment of python?

One-liners that would kill Perl masters by heart attacks half from envy, half from horror

Re: US government commits to publish publicly financed software under FOSS licenses

#76

It seems like they've cut a wide swath for (probably) exempting the most interesting of the software that could have been developed in the open. > Applicable exceptions are as follows: > The release of the item is restricted by another statute or regulation, such as the Export Administration Regulations, the International Traffic in Arms Regulation, or the laws and regulations governing classified information; > The…

Of course there are many exemptions. Did you expect them to release the F-22 source code or NSA PRISM architecture?

Operational stuff no, but GCHQ publish their graph database for example: https://github.com/GovernmentCommunicationsHeadquarters/Gaff...

Re: US government commits to publish publicly financed software under FOSS licenses

#78
post #77

Heh. I submitted a FOIA request two weeks ago for code for a $100M system used for storing parking ticket data. They have 5 days to ask for an extension, but they haven't even responded with that. Guess I'm going to lawyer up again..

What is the penalty for not responding in time?

Re: US government commits to publish publicly financed software under FOSS licenses

#79
post #77

Heh. I submitted a FOIA request two weeks ago for code for a $100M system used for storing parking ticket data. They have 5 days to ask for an extension, but they haven't even responded with that. Guess I'm going to lawyer up again..

What is the penalty for not responding in time?

For Illinois, two big things - 1. They can't reject the FOIA with "unduly burdensome" anymore, which is an incredibly common and frustrating response. 2. They can be sued for not complying, which then becomes a slow drawn out process. The upside is that it's something like 8k if the judge thinks the request was rejected/ignored intentionally or without proper followup.

Example - I did a FOIA that was rejected absurdly unfairly. Going through the attorney general took about 6 months to hear a response back, which Chicago's lawyer then used essentially a mistype to throw that request out. 8 months in total there. Fast forward 6 months later and we have a court date with a lot of small things in between then and now.

Re: US government commits to publish publicly financed software under FOSS licenses

#80
post #77

Heh. I submitted a FOIA request two weeks ago for code for a $100M system used for storing parking ticket data. They have 5 days to ask for an extension, but they haven't even responded with that. Guess I'm going to lawyer up again..

What is the penalty for not responding in time?

https://firstamendmentcoalition.org/2009/06/non-response-to-...
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