US government commits to publish publicly financed software under FOSS licenses • Hacker News Board

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

#91

Post by justinlardinois » Mon, Apr 04, 2016, 4:19 AM UTC

tzs wrote: post #55

justinlardinois wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> creative output such as artwork and music If I'm not mistaken, all intellectual property published by the US government is public domain by law. I may be wrong or you may be referring to something else.

Close. It's not publication by the government that is important. It's authorship. If a work is a work prepared by an officer or employee of the United States Government as part of that person’s official duties, then it is not subject to copyright in the US. It might be subject to copyright in other countries, though. If the government pays for a work to be created and published, but it is not a work prepared by an of…

I suppose you're right, but isn't that simply an issue of contract negotiation? Often when a private actor hires a contractor to create IP, part of what they're buying is ownership of the IP itself. I have no idea if the US government does this or not.

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

#92

Post by ChrisDutrow » Mon, Apr 04, 2016, 5:33 AM UTC

bpchaps wrote: post #79

MichaelApproved wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 absurdl…

Why do these get rejected? Is it just people being lazy? Or people not understanding how to handle the request? Seems like a lot of work for them to go to court?

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

#93

Post by incompatible » Mon, Apr 04, 2016, 6:10 AM UTC

deathanatos wrote: post #86

> The custom-build software will also be published to the general public either as public domain, or as Free Software so others can improve and reuse the software. > However, it is encouraged to be retroactively applicable for the existing custom-build software developed by agency employees in the course of their official duties. As much as I love FOSS, anything produced by the government — including software — is pu…

Public domain in the USA, but automatically copyrighted in practically every other country in the world.

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

#94

Post by bpchaps » Mon, Apr 04, 2016, 7:05 AM UTC

ChrisDutrow wrote: post #92

bpchaps wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 absurdl…

Why do these get rejected? Is it just people being lazy? Or people not understanding how to handle the request? Seems like a lot of work for them to go to court?

A few things -

1. Definitely a lot of laziness from the FOIA officers. Some are really great, but others not so much.

2. There's no standardization in how it's handled within the city. Departments in the same buildings have very different idea of what should be rejected, their helpfulness, looseness of FOIA interpretation, etc.

3. They're truly not technical in the slightest. At one point I asked for a database dump, excluding sensitive columns and tables. The response was "Wikipedia defines a Data as:", so I had some fun explaining that one.

4. Fighting the process takes a very long time, so a rejection is an easy way to get someone to go away.

5. Not a reason, but still annoying.. They wait the maximum days to respond to your requests. Of the 50 or so I've submitted, I'd say 45 of them have been last minute. 25 times out of the 50, sure... but most?

It's a lot of work if it gets to that point, yep, but I've only ever needed my lawyer to file a suit. The average FOIA might take me 5 minutes to write, so it's not really that much time - especially considering what you get for it.

Here's an example one with some pretty neat data from it: https://github.com/red-bin/chitickets

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

#95

Post by HappyTypist » Mon, Apr 04, 2016, 10:14 AM UTC

tajen wrote: post #23

nxzero wrote: 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?

perhaps use a Merkle hash to verify your vote was counted?

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

#96

Post by tvararu » Mon, Apr 04, 2016, 12:23 PM UTC

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #69

This has been a UK government stance for a while but the problem is that while the UK gov spends something like 8BN pa on software licenses the amount of new development is fairly low (outside of say the GDS - central cabinet office group pushing all this) So for example, my local council wants to purchase software to help track customer feedback from dozens of sources (web sites, phone ins etc). Sounds perfect for a…

> This has been a UK government stance for a while

As further confirmation, it's cemented as one of the ten design principles behind GOV.UK: https://www.gov.uk/design-principles#tenth

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

#97

Post by atonse » Mon, Apr 04, 2016, 1:33 PM UTC

rmason wrote: post #84

I presented on this three years ago to the state government here in Michigan. It makes far more sense for the state's to do this than the Feds. Why should there be fifty different software programs to register for a state campground? Or deal with the DMV? When the Feds pass a new law some contractor ends up writing the same software fifty different times for each individual state with small differences. I believe the…

Intuitively makes sense until you realize that there are similarly a lot of line of business apps that are used and implemented again and again across federal agencies.

For example, every classified document has a classification level (Secret, Top Secret, with more details on it). And the functionality to roll up the classification is re-implemented by every contractor every single system. So even within ONE agency, every system's implementation is done from scratch.

It's the perfect kind of thing that could've been an open source library (still in a classified network though), but still extremely valuable. It's something I built and recommended to my superiors ten years ago when I worked for a government contractor, but we didn't get much traction for various reasons. (Cynically, most contractors want the free money to reimplement it, so they aren't going to stop that gravy train.)

So there is a LOT of room even within each single agency, to share code that is common to their business practices.

You'll be hard pressed to find an area in any large organization (public or private) that couldn't benefit from the efficiencies of reuse.

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

#98

Post by grayclhn » Mon, Apr 04, 2016, 2:58 PM UTC

carussell wrote: post #90

justinlardinois wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> creative output such as artwork and music If I'm not mistaken, all intellectual property published by the US government is public domain by law. I may be wrong or you may be referring to something else.

Freely redistributable artifacts are one thing, but publication "in the preferred form for making modifications" is a pretty important part of FOSS.

For most documents, copy and paste into a text editor is relatively straightforward. Highly technical documents are one obvious exception.

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

#99

Post by sleepersmith » Mon, Apr 04, 2016, 3:17 PM UTC

twistedpair wrote: post #45

andrewstuart2 wrote: post #5

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?

Of course not. That's why encryption algorithms are always best kept proprietary. /sarcasm.

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

#100

Post by derefr » Mon, Apr 04, 2016, 6:33 PM UTC

wlievens wrote: post #33

derefr wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It pushes the incentives around as well, though. Unless there's some sort of marginal cost for each line of code they choose to keep proprietary, they'll inevitably do "the least work necessary" when they realize that some project is going to have components fitting these clauses, by by boxing up the entire effort under one of these clauses. Ideally, with some sort of force opposing propriety, the incentive would be…

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

I was using LOC as a hand-wave-y abstraction; substitute something like "total AST-node information-theoretic entropy measured via compressed size of language-canonicalized source" if you want to be picky.