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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

#121

Post by pjmlp »

tasogare wrote: post #103
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).

The problem is that to sort it out properly we need a complete EU based stack, starting from the hardware.

Re: Governments should adopt and invest in FOSS

#122

Post by adrianN »

pydry wrote: post #84
yholio wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>US claims that the Chinese can insert snooping tech in their hardware, which is of course true. Huawei have been caught doing this (e.g. with the African Union HQ where they set everything up). This very much isn't true for a lot of Huawei equipment, though, where the source code is loaded manually, Huawei are very willing to allow manual inspection and the equipment forms part of the "dumb" routing infrastructure r…

How many backdoor accounts have been found in Cisco products so far? Dozens?

Re: Governments should adopt and invest in FOSS

#123

Post by de_watcher »

Aunche wrote: post #93
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 I don't follow this logic. I can't think of any case where I view the source code of software that I paid for.

Well, too bad.

Re: Governments should adopt and invest in FOSS

#124

Post by de_watcher »

pjmlp wrote: post #119
lmm wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Not really.

Re: Governments should adopt and invest in FOSS

#125

Post by pjmlp »

de_watcher wrote: post #124
pjmlp wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not really.

Yes, really, anecdote of one.

All the government projects I worked on, used SCM systems managed by government IT departments.

Also zero contributions were made back from the FOSS stuff that were used in the project, they were kept in their IT SCM repositories.

Re: Governments should adopt and invest in FOSS

#126

Post by de_watcher »

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…

A typical FOSS has already a lot of customizability.

Yes, they want to have a lot of specific stuff, but it isn't that dramatic.

Re: Governments should adopt and invest in FOSS

#127

Post by RealStickman_ »

kube-system wrote: post #112
RealStickman_ wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Android is open source though.

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

Does the GPL prevent someone from making money? I think it only forces everyone to publish their source code.

Re: Governments should adopt and invest in FOSS

#128

Post by MaxBarraclough »

RealStickman_ wrote: post #127
kube-system wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Does the GPL prevent someone from making money? I think it only forces everyone to publish their source code.

Roughly speaking that's correct. The GPL isn't hostile to paid means of distributing a program, but it's hostile to distributing binaries while deliberately obstructing access to source-code. [0]

An aside in the interests of precision: the GPL doesn't force 'everyone' to publish their source. If your fork is private and is never distributed at all, you aren't obligated to make your source-code available, and you don't even need to tell anyone you have your own fork. The Affero GPL licence differs from the standard GPL, on this point.

[0] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DoesTheGPLAllowMon...

Re: Governments should adopt and invest in FOSS

#129

Post by Avamander »

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.

Oh it absolutely does, it's like kryptonite to companies that want to keep everything theirs a secret. It's a secondary effect, but it's there.

Re: Governments should adopt and invest in FOSS

#130

Post by Avamander »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #80
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).

By selling those they are becoming a tax payer. You are basically arguing that there's limited amount of pie and we can't create more...

> By selling those they are becoming a tax payer.

Given the massive amount of tax-evasion there are doubts about that.

And I'm not arguing that there's limited amount of pie. I'm arguing that it's not okay to make people pay for pie, lace it with cardboard and ask them to pay for it again.

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