The combat slogan for this is: public money, public code!
If Software Is Funded from a Public Source, Its Code Should Be Open Source
101–110 of 277 posts
Re: If Software Is Funded from a Public Source, Its Code Should Be Open Source
#102Government scientist here. IANAL, but my understanding is that all software written by US government civil servants is in the public domain. It cannot be copyrighted or otherwise licensed (although the government can patent things). This does not necessarily mean that it is available to the public, as noted in the other comments; it may be classified, considered For Official Use Only, or restricted from release by IT…
I used to work in a state government job as a student intern, and they said they wanted an internal directory for some various tasks. You can think of it like an inventory manager sort of website, purely on our intranet.
The mad lad my lead was, said we would need a database for retaining some of the basic data we needed to keep track of. Nothing all that special, just a few tables, and by nature nothing sensitive would be tracked.
This got rejected immediately, and our IT literally cited "no database installations are allowed per security team."
Needless to say 4 months later, after some back and forth, he eventually said "whatever, we'll just store everything to files then" and that's how he came up with the world's slowest inventory manager - I suspect just the way they like it.
Re: If Software Is Funded from a Public Source, Its Code Should Be Open Source
#103Government scientist here. IANAL, but my understanding is that all software written by US government civil servants is in the public domain. It cannot be copyrighted or otherwise licensed (although the government can patent things). This does not necessarily mean that it is available to the public, as noted in the other comments; it may be classified, considered For Official Use Only, or restricted from release by IT…
It depends on your definition of "civil servant". DoE national labs are run by contractors, such as the University of California, who have their own tech transfer policies and offices. As a result, I can't legally use most of the software I wrote as an NIH-funded postdoc. (One of the many reasons I don't work there any more.)
Re: If Software Is Funded from a Public Source, Its Code Should Be Open Source
#104Most posts on this thread are focusing on exceptional cases where there are obvious reasons not to open the source, such as defense, but huge amounts of publicly-funded code is locked up for no reason whatsoever. Let's discuss some use cases that make more sense: 1. healthcare.gov 2. Stoplights/traffic control cameras. 3. Voting machines. 4. Electrical grid. 5. IRS.
Man it would be pretty amazing to be able to submit a Pull Request to the IRS. Matt Cutts if you're reading this please help! On another note, I'm not sure I agree on the electrical grid or traffic controls being open sourced ... could imagine some nefarious things happening as a result of that
Or at the very least our entire national tax code should be downloadable in machine-readable form.
Re: If Software Is Funded from a Public Source, Its Code Should Be Open Source
#105An unpopular opinion I guess, but the article is saying if you receive government funding, it should be open source.
That's more than just government employees making code. It's also any company, individual or agency that even accepts $1 of public grant money or any external contracts.
We're talking about hundreds of thousands of coders who's daily job is partially funded by the government having to push their code public.
I worked for an ad agency for a time that created websites and sent emails for tourism. The tourism website needs to be open source? The program that sends out discount coupons to public attractions and parks? Each HTML email I code needs to be submitted to repository somewhere?
I don't think people realize just how many millions of lines of code per day we're talking about here. Most of them being inconsequential things. 99.999999% of that being noise.
You've just jacked up the cost of working with the government. More time spent coding. More documentation for things that shouldn't need it. More time spent with compliance issues. Companies need to charge more. More tax dollars wasted.
Re: If Software Is Funded from a Public Source, Its Code Should Be Open Source
#106Government scientist here. IANAL, but my understanding is that all software written by US government civil servants is in the public domain. It cannot be copyrighted or otherwise licensed (although the government can patent things). This does not necessarily mean that it is available to the public, as noted in the other comments; it may be classified, considered For Official Use Only, or restricted from release by IT…
It depends on your definition of "civil servant". DoE national labs are run by contractors, such as the University of California, who have their own tech transfer policies and offices. As a result, I can't legally use most of the software I wrote as an NIH-funded postdoc. (One of the many reasons I don't work there any more.)
Contractors are not civil servants.
It is completely true that contractor-written software is legally different and has its own release policies. For one thing, it can be copyrighted. Again, IANAL, but I assume that there would be stipulations written into the contract governing IP.
Re: If Software Is Funded from a Public Source, Its Code Should Be Open Source
#107Government scientist here. IANAL, but my understanding is that all software written by US government civil servants is in the public domain. It cannot be copyrighted or otherwise licensed (although the government can patent things). This does not necessarily mean that it is available to the public, as noted in the other comments; it may be classified, considered For Official Use Only, or restricted from release by IT…
I used to work in a state government job as a student intern, and they said they wanted an internal directory for some various tasks. You can think of it like an inventory manager sort of website, purely on our intranet. The mad lad my lead was, said we would need a database for retaining some of the basic data we needed to keep track of. Nothing all that special, just a few tables, and by nature nothing sensitive wo…
Shh... Don't tell them that stuff like SQLite _is_ a flat-file database.
Re: If Software Is Funded from a Public Source, Its Code Should Be Open Source
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed, safety and essential infrastructure should probably not be open source. That said, the main points of infrastructure access and configuration are probably larger issues at hand over the actual systems source itself. As to TFA, I have mixed feelings. I'm actually more concerned about research and related patents and data surrounding publicly funded study. I do feel that Open-Source should be given some level o…
Disagreed, safety and essential infrastructure should definitely be open source. Right now your typical infrastructure project is about as leaky as they come compared to a typical web app. Exposing that stuff to broad daylight will certainly help to harden it.
I wish I had as much faith in the government as you ... then again as a resident of the netherlands I suppose you might have reason to have more faith than I do in the US?
In principle I completely agree that things being in the open should help to harden them, but especially in the US where funding is often used as a bargaining chip and bureaucracy is rampant I get a bit nervous
Re: If Software Is Funded from a Public Source, Its Code Should Be Open Source
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps we could just stop making weapons software? I mean, someone needs to go first. When I look at wars throughout the world, a huge number of them are fought with US weapons, and we don't actually have a good track record of supporting peaceful people. I don't think that we'll get there until we stop dumping weapons on the world for profit.
Of course this would be great, we'd all like this to happen. But your perspective is dangerously shallow and juvenile, the real world just straight up doesn't work this way. If you believe in this enough, you're better off leaving the U.S. IMHO. If you disagree, I recommend visiting a country on the verge of complete collapse. Do that, then think about how good we have it, think about how many people want to take tha…
> But your perspective is dangerously shallow and juvenile
There was a line in one of the Expanse books that really got me, where a woman was talking to her son, and paraphrasing, she explained that "We have lost again". When her son inquired how, she said, again paraphrasing "Those who want peace have lost to those who want violence."
One of the primary ways we can do this, is to simply stop exporting it. As of 2017, we export 50% more arms than the #2 country, Russia, https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/interactive/2017/02/10-cou..., and we will as long as people who support violence and the contemporary model of arms sales throughout the world call people who disagree with it "juvenile".
Re: If Software Is Funded from a Public Source, Its Code Should Be Open Source
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed, safety and essential infrastructure should probably not be open source. That said, the main points of infrastructure access and configuration are probably larger issues at hand over the actual systems source itself. As to TFA, I have mixed feelings. I'm actually more concerned about research and related patents and data surrounding publicly funded study. I do feel that Open-Source should be given some level o…
Disagreed, safety and essential infrastructure should definitely be open source. Right now your typical infrastructure project is about as leaky as they come compared to a typical web app. Exposing that stuff to broad daylight will certainly help to harden it.
And how much of that is already using open-source and it's the configuration that's leaky, and not the software itself?
How many poorly maintained/updated/configured Linux hosts are out there? Same for Windows, etc... in the end, the software can be the greatest, but if the host's configuration is poorly setup/managed, what does it matter.