If Software Is Funded from a Public Source, Its Code Should Be Open Source
1–10 of 277 posts
Re: If Software Is Funded from a Public Source, Its Code Should Be Open Source
#2Yeah! NSA fork over those hacking tools!
Re: If Software Is Funded from a Public Source, Its Code Should Be Open Source
#3Also of concern is a tragedy of commons like issue where those who contributed no funding are able to get the software for free. For example if a piece of city focused software is FOSS and then a bunch of other cities choose to consume it but not contribute to the funding or code.
Re: If Software Is Funded from a Public Source, Its Code Should Be Open Source
#4Also of concern is a tragedy of commons like issue where those who contributed no funding are able to get the software for free. For example if a piece of city focused software is FOSS and then a bunch of other cities choose to consume it but not contribute to the funding or code.
I think that's a poor application of tragedy of the commons.
Also, in your example, I don't know how other cities' use would impede the funding city's use.
Re: If Software Is Funded from a Public Source, Its Code Should Be Open Source
#5I am an open source advocate, but I don't really agree here. Should the IRS, NSA, CIA, and FBI code all be open source? Here are some cases where closed source software, with some security by obscurity could be helpful. Another example would be some software around designing nuclear systems.
But as an example maybe a software funded by the national weather service to run simulations, that aught to be open source (perhaps something like that exists and is open source, that's not my area).
But a counter argument to mine could be that some software that is security focused might be more secure if it was open source. I think this is an area with a lot of nuance, and absolute statements are hard to make.
Re: If Software Is Funded from a Public Source, Its Code Should Be Open Source
#6Also of concern is a tragedy of commons like issue where those who contributed no funding are able to get the software for free. For example if a piece of city focused software is FOSS and then a bunch of other cities choose to consume it but not contribute to the funding or code.
I think that's a poor application of tragedy of the commons. Also, in your example, I don't know how other cities' use would impede the funding city's use.
In theory you might get a situation where several cities try to wait each other out for similar tasks, hoping another city will buckle first and fund it.
Re: If Software Is Funded from a Public Source, Its Code Should Be Open Source
#7> The site points out some compelling reasons why any government code produced with public money should be free software.
Yeah, but what compelling reasons are there for the government to write any software at all?
Another way to solve the problem - eliminate government spending. I'd rather have my money back than reference government-developed source code.
Re: If Software Is Funded from a Public Source, Its Code Should Be Open Source
#8Yeah! NSA fork over those hacking tools!
In a bit of fairness to the NSA (never thought I'd say that), they did give us SELinux, which I think was overall a net good.
Re: If Software Is Funded from a Public Source, Its Code Should Be Open Source
#9Yeah! NSA fork over those hacking tools!
As an aside, NSA is releasing GHIDRA next month: https://www.rsaconference.com/events/us19/agenda/sessions/16...
Re: If Software Is Funded from a Public Source, Its Code Should Be Open Source
#10It would certainly be interesting to make a pull request for something like Healthcare.gov or something. I wonder if it's measurable how much tax money we could save (if any) if we allowed the public to audit and improve our code.