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Governments should adopt and invest in FOSS

jamesmcm.github.io

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Re: Governments should adopt and invest in FOSS

#111

Post by jandrewrogers »

zapita wrote: post #107
jandrewrogers wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

This does not solve the issues because it often already works that way today. All of the code I've ever written under GPL was as a private contractor to the government.

The code I wrote is not supported by anyone and reflects the interests of those who paid for it. All of the most advanced systems work, even if not classified, is not open source and often not in literature and this is a condition of accessing that technology at all.

For the US Federal government, they are often dysfunctional when it comes to sustainable open source. And when it comes to the more interesting computer science tech, they have no leverage to make it open source nor any real interest TBH.

Re: Governments should adopt and invest in FOSS

#112

Post by kube-system »

RealStickman_ wrote: post #105
pabs3 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I paid $24.99 for my first copy of Linux. Bought it on the shelf at Walmart, actually.

Re: Governments should adopt and invest in FOSS

#113

Post by Dylan16807 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #96
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…

> Since its taxpayers money, any custom made software for gov MUST be FOSS or we can equally abandon any logic whatsoever For the federal government, it would make more sense for it to be public domain (not subject to copyright), the same as federal works generally. State government works are generally.copyright by the state just as if the state were a private actor, with no particular mandated licensing scheme, so a…

Public domain is a subset of FOSS.

Re: Governments should adopt and invest in FOSS

#114

Post by executesorder66 »

systematical wrote: post #101

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…

Why are you unable to merge your changes upstream?

Re: Governments should adopt and invest in FOSS

#115

Post by ghego1 »

pkz wrote: post #15

1. I think many public sector organizations in Europe lack basic knowledge of FOSS and have IT managers that don't even know what it is. 2. In many ways it is surprising that generic software like cloud office functionality in reality only have two suppliers, both from the US, in the public sector. The amount of money that is being paid by tax payers every year for that across the EU is staggering. Maybe the Schrems…

> 1. I think many public sector organizations in Europe lack basic knowledge of FOSS and have IT managers that don't even know what it is.

Confirmed. Source: I teach these topics in University, including in post graduate courses for public officials, and most of the students don't have a clue of what OSS means (the whole words), and don't even realize why the F matters. I usually explain what source code is, and from there all they way down to that F.

I am deeply convinced that one, if not the the most, worrying problem of our times is a general lack of proper education in all levels of societies, except for a small portion of the population.

Re: Governments should adopt and invest in FOSS

#116

Post by majkinetor »

mulmen wrote: post #52
yholio wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trust you have in the phone company is another target of attack than the one discussed here, the fact that operators need to trust closed source blobs in their networks, often times provided by other states with strategic interests in what goes on over their networks.

Maybe I wasn’t clear. Even if the government publishes the source of whatever I am interacting with how do I know the source they publish is the same source I am interacting with? Nothing stops them from adding some malicious patch before deploying the open code. It’s all still based on trust.

There could be regular random audits by relevant gov ministry.

Re: Governments should adopt and invest in FOSS

#117

Post by majkinetor »

Barrin92 wrote: post #71
rbecker wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't agree with this. Probably because you missed the "custom made" part. > secrecy and avoiding to give away software that is vital to national security. This would obviously be an exception and the code wouldn't be publicized. But that doesn't mean it can't be open-source to the government itself. > this would effectively prohibit companies who do proprietary work in the private sector to work with the governm…

So taking your example, the government could not use Windows unless Microsoft decides to open-source it? You realise how much infrastructure of the government runs on Windows right? And not just the operating system itself, but large parts of the software on top, you'd basically have to spend, I don't know dozens of billions to port it all to open-source software, just so you get the source code? Mind you that open-s…

Windows is supporting tech. There is no such requirement.

Custom made software is not, and requirement should be for it.

> this would effectively prohibit companies who do proprietary work in the private sector to work with the government at the same time, because they'd be forced to open source their code.

The company that does implementation work wouldn't be influenced IMO in any way whatsoever - they already have an active deal with gov, they are 100% on the topic, they have the best chance to offer quality support as they developed it etc. The other gov client who takes that software and does't pay development will pay support to the same company and additional development in majority of cases. First client could incorporate such changes without any additional price making entire ecosystem better. If third company now devotes its time to study, and improve the open code, so that they are now better at it then original company who developed it, then by all the logic they are the right team to continue with it. This effectually reduces lock in which is the major problem. Academia could research those open systems to look for bugs and other defects and provide stream of fresh minds already prepared to work on the gov systems. It looks like too good to be true IMO.

Re: Governments should adopt and invest in FOSS

#118

Post by de_watcher »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #111
zapita wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

This does not solve the issues because it often already works that way today. All of the code I've ever written under GPL was as a private contractor to the government. The code I wrote is not supported by anyone and reflects the interests of those who paid for it. All of the most advanced systems work, even if not classified, is not open source and often not in literature and this is a condition of accessing that te…

I've written some proprietary code and I know that my competitor contractors have written a similar thing.

I don't know whether it's the way to 'create more jobs'.

GPL frees individual developers from the companies. It changes the tempo of competition process because there is less of inertia.

Re: Governments should adopt and invest in FOSS

#119

Post by pjmlp »

lmm wrote: post #86
Barrin92 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't agree with this. The government should purchase software or services based on quality of the service provided and cost. It's nice if the software is open source, but it doesn't need to be just because tax payers pay for it. That's a total non-sequitur. If the government buys Mercedes cars it doesn't demand Mercedes to hand over the engineering designs for the cars. In fact in the entire military and intellige…

> If the government buys Mercedes cars it doesn't demand Mercedes to hand over the engineering designs for the cars. > In fact in the entire military and intelligence space I don't even think this is practically possible due to secrecy and avoiding to give away software that is vital to national security. The military is likely a case where the government does demand the engineering designs, production lines etc. Ope…

The user, as the government agency getting the outcome of the contractors work, already has access to the source code most of the time.

Re: Governments should adopt and invest in FOSS

#120

Post by pjmlp »

pydry wrote: post #83
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.

>I love Postgres but it really does not do what Oracle does Right, Postgres doesn't have aggressive salespeople trying to convince key decisionmakers in your enterprise to switch away from Oracle.

It also doesn't have an IDE experience that matches SQLDeveloper, including for debugging stored procedures, doesn't do distributed transactions, integrate with OLAP, provide a Web based framework for quick CRUD applications, bare metal deployment where the RDMS is the OS.
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