211–220 of 277 posts
On a sidenote, apparently the new administration scrapped it for a brochure Wordpress site. Funny discussion here: https://www.reddit.com/r/drupal/comments/7kw7eu/whitehousego...
I 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 (per…
[0] sourcecode.cio.gov
Beware the law of unintended consequences - it’ll bite you!
(For the record, I agree with the sentiment, but it’s hard to implement without causing undesirable effects.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It doesn't strike me as a huge loss to society if source code updates are only released, say, once per year. It's not ideal but it's not terrible either. (Of course, if the updates aren't happening at all because of opaque internal procedures, that's a different story.)
What usually happens is that it doesn't get released at all. It isn't worth the effort. I've got tons of code I've written over the years that, if I could just throw it onto github, I would. But since it would take me six weeks of pain, I don't. Some of that code I'm kind of proud of, or was at the time I wrote it, anyway. I wrote an rviz app a decade before ROS took off.
(If there were more people filing request, I wonder if the internal procedure would be made less painful out of necessity...)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I contribute, I utilize and I appreciate open source and the community of dedicated contributors. Open source software is great and "YES" frankly the vast vast majoring of those involved in the use of open source software are freeloaders. We (yes I include myself) typically sow way less than we reap. This argument though is not about the merits of open source software but about the use of public funds. "If my taxes h…
On the other hand if my taxes went to pay for something I should get to know what it is, shouldn't I? If our elected representatives paid 500 million of our tax dollars for some piece of software shouldn't we be able to audit it and see if that was money well spent? If we can't do this, how will we know which representatives to vote for again?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There are some things the IRS shouldn't release like their fraud detection or anything related to deciding who should get audited That's perhaps a good reason for that part of the software to not be published and/or FOIA disclosable, but that's orthogonal to how it is licensed. If it's an original government work now it would be public domain (which is more open than open source), but still potentially confidential…
While I appreciate the distinction between license and classification, does it really matter if a piece of software is "in the public domain" if its very existence and content is classified and non-disclosable? It may as well not exist as far as open-source or public domain is concerned.
If the entire work is, less so than if it was disclosable (although there are laws governing the government use of copyright protected work, and arguably there is a benefit to the public interest if the vendor has provided and open source license even if the work is not publicly disclosable.)
But practically, classification and, perhaps even moreso, the other exceptions to FOIA would often apply to limited portions of software systems rather than whole systems, as is often the case with other materials covered by FOIA.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mostly sortof true, but there are lots of complications. I've delved into this. For lots of detail on the current situation, see my paper, "Publicly Releasing Open Source Software Developed for the U.S. Government" by David A. Wheeler, https://www.csiac.org/journal-article/publicly-releasing-ope... In almost all cases, if a US Federal employee writes software as part of his/her official duties, then there is no copyr…
>Most software developed by government funds is developed, at least in part, by contractors. And that is a COMPLETELY different circumstance. The details, unsurprisingly, depend on the contract. // Isn't the point that the contact should have a non-negotiable OSS clause of it's using public funds. My impression, from my seat in Europe, is that USA government is run by rich capitalists that would as soon eat faeces li…
Okay. Say you're a vendor for student information systems. It handles registration, enrollment, scheduling, attendance, report cards, state and federal reporting, teacher gradebooks, parent portal, etc. You sell your product to one school district with 800 students for an initial fee of $100,000 plus an annual fee of $5 per student and $10,000 for up to X hours of direct support (note: these numbers are not far off the actual costs).
Except now it's open source, and every one of the hundreds of thousands of school districts in the country suddenly has access to your software without charge.
Sure, you can come up with dozens of reasons why that's great for schools, but you're the SIS vendor that just spent a couple million dollars producing the software. Why would you be in a business where the moment you sell your product, you can no longer sell your product? Support? Okay, but you'll immediately be competing with other support vendors, etc.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned code.gov - see https://code.gov/ This is part of the implementation of M-16-21, which said, "Each agency shall release as OSS at least 20 percent of its new custom-developed code each year for the term of the pilot program. (3 years)".
If it's not an issue, make it one.
If no one cares to support the issue, find someone to run on it.
If you can't find someone to run on the issue, you've got to run yourself.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the other hand if my taxes went to pay for something I should get to know what it is, shouldn't I? If our elected representatives paid 500 million of our tax dollars for some piece of software shouldn't we be able to audit it and see if that was money well spent? If we can't do this, how will we know which representatives to vote for again?
This is a complete red herring. Within reason you can see where your money went. This is what a FOIA request is for.