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Petition: Public Money Should Produce Public Code

creativecommons.org

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Re: Petition: Public Money Should Produce Public Code

#11

Post by vog »

zero_shift wrote: post #2

One counter argument: national taxes shouldn't be used to produce code that could benefit other countries, unless that is recognised as a kind of international aid. (Not my opinion, but one I can imagine from certain political quarters)

The canonical counter-counter argument is that of course this needs to be established in other countries as well.

For example, this is pretty popular political demand here in Germany, as well as in the European Union. (Closely related, almost a special case: that scientific results, especially from public universities, should be open access. And all sources, code as well as collected data, should be openly available.)

It is essentially the same issue as with trading agreements, just a different solution: Instead of waiting for bilateral agreements, here single countries can make a start without having a huge disadvantage.

Re: Petition: Public Money Should Produce Public Code

#12

Post by jsty »

dmos62 wrote: post #8

I hope this campaign gets some traction. Closed source is wasteful, and even more so to fund it with public money. Software development today is quite inefficient. It mainly suffers from two problems: duplicated effort, when a solution already exists, but it is inaccessible, and misdirected effort, when a problem is solved in a way that doesn't facilitate preparing other, possibly hardly-related, solutions in the fut…

> misdirected effort, when a problem is solved in a way that doesn't facilitate preparing other, possibly hardly-related, solutions in the future

Would you be able to clarify what you mean by this? In my experience, trying to write all-encompassing software quickly leads to issues with actually ever getting anything out the door in a working state - better to solve your particular problem and generalise later as needed.

Re: Petition: Public Money Should Produce Public Code

#13

Post by corobo »

jsty wrote: post #12
dmos62 wrote: post #8

I hope this campaign gets some traction. Closed source is wasteful, and even more so to fund it with public money. Software development today is quite inefficient. It mainly suffers from two problems: duplicated effort, when a solution already exists, but it is inaccessible, and misdirected effort, when a problem is solved in a way that doesn't facilitate preparing other, possibly hardly-related, solutions in the fut…

> misdirected effort, when a problem is solved in a way that doesn't facilitate preparing other, possibly hardly-related, solutions in the future Would you be able to clarify what you mean by this? In my experience, trying to write all-encompassing software quickly leads to issues with actually ever getting anything out the door in a working state - better to solve your particular problem and generalise later as need…

In my experience misdirected effort comes more from a lack of planning or full-fat spec being produced before the work begins rather than an attempt to cram in every feature under the sun.

Instead of knowing exactly what features to put in you get a request along the line of "We need something that does x" and no time to plan how to do x, so you end up with something that does it then the feature creep starts, making the original x look like a code version of Seth Brundle after his teleportation mishap in The Fly.

The age old "Weeks of programming can save hours of planning"

Re: Petition: Public Money Should Produce Public Code

#14

Post by giancarlostoro »

fmsf wrote: post #9

This would specially be interesting to enable easy external auditing. Specially since governments rely a lot in large consulting companies, and these often deliver software of questionable quality. Also easier to evaluate would be the high costs usually associated with contracts to develop software sponsored by tax money.

Also those who review the open sourced code could find themselves getting job offers potentially, or find it easier to apply for jobs with those systems. The only exception I see to the whole "Public Money should produce Public Code" is in the defense sector depending on the project components. We wouldn't want to share code that is used in war with the entire world I don't think?

Re: Petition: Public Money Should Produce Public Code

#15

Post by rvanmil »

I've seen quite some code which was paid for by public money. If this would actually happen it would mostly just expose a tremendous shitheap of "enterprise" code created by consulting firms whose entire business model is based on delivering and "maintaining" overengineered crap with huge maintenance costs.

Re: Petition: Public Money Should Produce Public Code

#16

Post by jsty »

corobo wrote: post #13
jsty wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> misdirected effort, when a problem is solved in a way that doesn't facilitate preparing other, possibly hardly-related, solutions in the future Would you be able to clarify what you mean by this? In my experience, trying to write all-encompassing software quickly leads to issues with actually ever getting anything out the door in a working state - better to solve your particular problem and generalise later as need…

In my experience misdirected effort comes more from a lack of planning or full-fat spec being produced before the work begins rather than an attempt to cram in every feature under the sun. Instead of knowing exactly what features to put in you get a request along the line of "We need something that does x" and no time to plan how to do x, so you end up with something that does it then the feature creep starts, making…

Totally agree. A few pages of good spec / design docs can save so much wasted effort. Indeed I'd struggle to think of many non-trivial past projects where committing the design to paper hasn't revealed some hidden flaw that would've bitten hard later on.

> Seth Brundle after his teleportation mishap in The Fly

For anyone who didn't get this reference like me ... http://i43.tinypic.com/2ngr969.jpg

Re: Petition: Public Money Should Produce Public Code

#17

Post by _asummers »

corobo wrote: post #13
jsty wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> misdirected effort, when a problem is solved in a way that doesn't facilitate preparing other, possibly hardly-related, solutions in the future Would you be able to clarify what you mean by this? In my experience, trying to write all-encompassing software quickly leads to issues with actually ever getting anything out the door in a working state - better to solve your particular problem and generalise later as need…

In my experience misdirected effort comes more from a lack of planning or full-fat spec being produced before the work begins rather than an attempt to cram in every feature under the sun. Instead of knowing exactly what features to put in you get a request along the line of "We need something that does x" and no time to plan how to do x, so you end up with something that does it then the feature creep starts, making…

I think the underlying wisdom is "don't create frameworks for your solution before you have it" not "don't anticipate your first and second degree direction changes".

Re: Petition: Public Money Should Produce Public Code

#18

Post by _joel »

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #3
zero_shift wrote: post #2

One counter argument: national taxes shouldn't be used to produce code that could benefit other countries, unless that is recognised as a kind of international aid. (Not my opinion, but one I can imagine from certain political quarters)

Has anyone ever made the argument that NASA images are international aid, because they help astronomers in other countries?

There are a lot of international cooperators, ESA, JAXA etc. For example, the JWST is a joint project between NASA, ESA and CSA. So it's would be remiss of them not to publish publicly (and perhaps break agreements)

Re: Petition: Public Money Should Produce Public Code

#20

Post by occultist_throw »

rvanmil wrote: post #15

I've seen quite some code which was paid for by public money. If this would actually happen it would mostly just expose a tremendous shitheap of "enterprise" code created by consulting firms whose entire business model is based on delivering and "maintaining" overengineered crap with huge maintenance costs.

Indeed.

I work at a public institution. Our department is paid by many other institutions around the country (networks). Our code is scary and terrifying. It's 95% perl5. We run bare metal on nearly everything. We have only the barest notions of a testbed.

Put it this way: if we were required to release our code, nobody would use our services. Frankly, I'm surprised it runs at all.

(BTW, other horror stories.. $DB_password in line 200 or so. No primary keys in our DB - or foreign for that matter. We have no idea of a schema... And on and on and on.)

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