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Unfortunately, that isn't how government works. Whether it's F35's or Microsoft Office, putting money into the pockets of political cronies is what drives the purchase. FOSS doesn't benefit anyone with power, so it's useless to the government.
I’ve got news for you dude, cronyism is a lot worse when selling to corporations.
Well, office suites, operating systems, and the myriad of FOSS projects used every day are as useful as that physical infrastructure. Especially in this day and age.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The major reason that proprietary software is so prominent in gov is corruption. I'd like to see more open source software in government, but the main reason we select proprietary solutions where I work is support. If more open source tools had support staff, maintenance agreements, etc. more government organizations (and businesses) would consider them viable. I may be fairly code-literate IT, but I don't understa…
That's common complaint. However, in my experience, proprietary support, especially on supportive technologies isn't that great either. It also seems more likely to find local expert on FOSS technology given that barrier to entry is 0.
For businesses and government, support is often mandatory, and at the least, it gives administrators "people to blame" when something goes wrong.
I feel open source with paid support is a very viable route for government, given it's general expectation of having paid support for the products it uses, but there's still an extreme minority of businesses successfully monetizing open source software.
Since its taxpayers money, any custom made software for gov MUST be FOSS or we can equally abandon any logic whatsoever - citizens payed for it, gov employees were working with implementation team on shaping it, so it belongs to them. This doesn't have to be so for supportive domains such as databases but I would personally prefer that also (i.e. Postgresql instead Oracle db). There are many more reasons for this the…
> Since its taxpayers money, any custom made software for gov MUST be FOSS or we can equally abandon any logic whatsoever This is why Free Software Foundation Europe created a petition to make all publicly paid code public: https://publiccode.eu .
Their coronavirus tracking app is open source [2]
And their Minister for Health made the commit to send the app website live [3] (though he did push to master on a Friday. I guess you can do that if you're the Minister...)
[2] https://github.com/minvws/nl-covid19-notification-app-ios
[3] https://github.com/minvws/nl-covid19-notification-app-websit...
Since its taxpayers money, any custom made software for gov MUST be FOSS or we can equally abandon any logic whatsoever - citizens payed for it, gov employees were working with implementation team on shaping it, so it belongs to them. This doesn't have to be so for supportive domains such as databases but I would personally prefer that also (i.e. Postgresql instead Oracle db). There are many more reasons for this the…
I hope my public opinion opens a fruitful dialogue.
Since its taxpayers money, any custom made software for gov MUST be FOSS or we can equally abandon any logic whatsoever - citizens payed for it, gov employees were working with implementation team on shaping it, so it belongs to them. This doesn't have to be so for supportive domains such as databases but I would personally prefer that also (i.e. Postgresql instead Oracle db). There are many more reasons for this the…
First, priorities and roadmaps for collaborative software development tend to be captured by the biggest and best funded government organization involved. A famous version of this is that the US government effectively drives the roadmap of international software development collaborations by virtue of readily spending money that their partner governments can't or won't match. The effects of resource disparities in development collaboration often lead to the practical effect that smaller organizations are not having their needs met and what little resources they do have are consumed by the overhead created by the resource scale of the big partners.
Second, quite a lot of proprietary software development within government has strict dependencies on closed source software for which there are neither open source equivalents nor likely to be open source equivalents for the foreseeable future. In these cases, open sourcing the government code generates relatively little value for other contributors while incurring the significant operational overhead that is inherent in open sourcing software.
Third, even in cases where the government software is open sourced, the projects are frequently unusable by other orgs because the software is effectively unsupported. Under government rules, you generally aren't allowed to spend a couple hours helping any random dev that emails you on what is essentially a support issue -- you are expressly not being paid to work on unrelated projects. A lot of government code that is open sourced is de facto abandonware, including much of the software I worked on, because there is no framework to provide support for the user base either formally or informally. Unlike with non-government open source, which tends to be responsive to random questions from the ether, emailing devs on government open source projects often goes to /dev/null.
I agree that the big consulting primes do a terrible job at software delivery but government doesn't have a good track record of effective open source software development either, for other structural reasons.
Since its taxpayers money, any custom made software for gov MUST be FOSS or we can equally abandon any logic whatsoever - citizens payed for it, gov employees were working with implementation team on shaping it, so it belongs to them. This doesn't have to be so for supportive domains such as databases but I would personally prefer that also (i.e. Postgresql instead Oracle db). There are many more reasons for this the…
This is not only true for software developed with public funds, but with any software that becomes critical for providing public services, communication in particular. Take for example the recent 5G spying debacle. US claims that the Chinese can insert snooping tech in their hardware, which is of course true. But the same thing is true for gear produced by American or European companies, so we are expected to choose…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Since its taxpayers money, any custom made software for gov MUST be FOSS or we can equally abandon any logic whatsoever This is why Free Software Foundation Europe created a petition to make all publicly paid code public: https://publiccode.eu .
What about the code used in, for example, defence systems or intelligence agencies?