Governments should adopt and invest in FOSS • Hacker News Board

Re: Governments should adopt and invest in FOSS

#101

Post by systematical » Mon, Sep 14, 2020, 4:21 AM UTC

I work as a government contractor. We've fixed bugs in OSS that we've used, but been unable to contribute the fixes back. This is a huge hassle because we are now on a fork and have to deal with merges from upstream, it will get worse over time.

More recently I developed a missing (in my view) extension to a piece of software. Too make this OSS-able would take a few extra hours and I wouldn't mind doing that step on my own time. But that's a nope.

So we can use OSS, we can modify OSS, but we can't contribute PRs or new software. At least for the three letter agency I work with. Lots of the type of applications being developed in the public sector aren't really any different then private sector. They take data in, they do something with it, and they output data. If the software doesn't require a security clearance, you should be able open source it IMO or at least contribute PRs.

Re: Governments should adopt and invest in FOSS

#102

Post by alien_ » Mon, Sep 14, 2020, 4:25 AM UTC

FOSS is a Commons, in my opinion every organization, government and company should use it as much as possible and invest in it a fraction of their IT budget, even if just 1%.

This would add up to resolve the current FOSS funding problems and the FOSS ecosystem would thrive.

They could do it by hiring developers or FOSS companies and/or funding targeted to the projects they use with a subscription like Tidelift.

Re: Governments should adopt and invest in FOSS

#103

Post by tasogare » Mon, Sep 14, 2020, 4:39 AM UTC

natmaka wrote: post #92

In France this is exactly the goal of an association founded in 2002, see (in French) https://adullact.org/index.php/association

It seems they just focus on the cost while the real problem is of sovereignty, and need to include an European dimension. The US have been found spying on the whole world (including their own citizens), so it’s warranted Europeans push back against US hardware and software the same way it’s done with China (Huawei).

Re: Governments should adopt and invest in FOSS

#104

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Sep 14, 2020, 4:40 AM UTC

majkinetor wrote: post #11

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…

[deleted]

Re: Governments should adopt and invest in FOSS

#105

Post by RealStickman_ » Mon, Sep 14, 2020, 4:47 AM UTC

pabs3 wrote: post #89

Avamander wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the only way to avoid large companies turning it into their own projects and selling that for a large markup, with very little benefit to the taxpayer and some extra user freedom infringement sprinkled on top. Even something like LGPL allows taking freedoms from users and it could be blatantly seen from the Polish eDowod software issue (that's still ongoing).

The GPL doesn't prevent large companies from selling software. Mobile phone vendors sell Linux based Android devices all the time and Linux is GPL.

Android is open source though.

Re: Governments should adopt and invest in FOSS

#106

Post by boxed » Mon, Sep 14, 2020, 5:26 AM UTC

MattGaiser wrote: post #19

I work for a government software development team (At least for the next week). I have other friends in other governments on other teams. I can’t see a government being able to build generalized software or contribute effectively to it. Governments don’t tend to have people who say no to feature requests. The end result is not a generalized good solution, but extremely specific solutions built on a generalized platfo…

There are much more constructive ways government can help. They can for example fund the core devs of programming languages, databases and similar foundational systems. A lot of this work is now done part time on their free time.

Re: Governments should adopt and invest in FOSS

#107

Post by zapita » Mon, Sep 14, 2020, 5:27 AM UTC

jandrewrogers wrote: post #48

majkinetor wrote: post #11

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…

There are a few other real-world aspects to the development and use of open source in government that make it more complex in my experience. 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 coll…

What about continuing to rely on private contractors, but with a mandate to open-source everything they develop with public funds? Perhaps that would address the issues you describe?

Re: Governments should adopt and invest in FOSS

#108

Post by browserface » Mon, Sep 14, 2020, 5:44 AM UTC

I hope some governments adopt my FOSS remote browser isolation product: https://github.com/dosyago/OuterShell

Re: Governments should adopt and invest in FOSS

#109

Post by sien » Mon, Sep 14, 2020, 5:48 AM UTC

sien wrote: post #57

Government does use and create a great deal of open source software. Github has this list of government and community organisations that use Github : https://government.github.com/community/ The organisation that I work for has over 200 Github repositories. The Australian government alone from that Github list is literally supporting thousands of open source repositories. It looks like many other governments around t…

Australia's CSIRO has their own bitbucket repo:

https://bitbucket.csiro.au/repos?visibility=public

(CSIRO also has quite a few repositories on Github as well)

Re: Governments should adopt and invest in FOSS

#110

Post by kube-system » Mon, Sep 14, 2020, 6:05 AM UTC

hannofcart wrote: post #63

mulmen wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love Postgres but it really does not do what Oracle does, even today and definitely not 15 years ago. My tax dollars paid for the M1 Abrams and the USS Enterprise but they won’t let me take either for a joyride. I still derive utility from those expenditures. It’s the same with software. If corruption is the problem I’m not sure how software licenses solve it.

Even assuming that Oracle does indeed have some features that Postgres does not (even with some extension), one will still need to make the case that _that_ specific Oracle feature is indispensable to a given government project.

Requirements for large projects are always more than technical. The killer feature of proprietary software is the power of the purse.

Often, a reason large organizations buy proprietary software is because of the power structure created when you have a legally binding contract with the sole maintainer of the project.

The #1 customer of a proprietary product has quite a bit of power to influence and shape how the vendor spends their development cycles. For FOSS, you are often cooperating with (or at least partially reliant on) people who have no financial incentive to favor your priorities.