Also: public money, public data. One can dream....
Public Money, Public Code
71–80 of 156 posts
Re: Public Money, Public Code
#72this has always puzzled me. Companies gets millions from the taxpayers to certain projects to develop their (something) Then another company get another million to develop same or similiar thing. Why it is not a required that if you get taxpayers' money, the results should be available for free to everyone, let's say after 12 months of grace perioid ??
Because that would be bad for society. It's important that money moves around as much as possible--every time it does, value is created. Think of it like the water cycle. By increasing the output of the sun (enacting laws to keep publicly-funded code private), we cause lots more money to evaporate from the taxpayer oceans (by solving the same problem repeatedly), and that in turn creates lots more fiscalonimbus clouds in the upper ten percentosphere (where you can find, e.g., large consulting businesses and shareholders). Before long, all that evaporated money (it's actually stock now, the most interesting property of which is that its value expands and contracts to fit whatever everyone thinks it should be worth) will start to precipitate when it's liquidated again, see? From there it rains on unspecified economic mountains and valleys, and eventually trickles back down into the ocean again.
You might point out that increasing the output of the sun in the real world actually result in a scorched, uninhabitable earth, and that also that's not how any of this works but hey, no analogy is perfect. And this one is plenty good enough to convince voters.
Re: Public Money, Public Code
#73I am fully in support of such initiative. So I am interested to hear what the possible downsides are? Please share your opinions on the matter as I can only see upsides to this.
I’ve been employed as a software developer for my state for almost 2 decades and just wonder what software should be included. I would guess 75% of what I develop is internal services and intranet garbage. The rest is one off tools full of garbage code and hardcoded credentials.
Should other divisions that are also publicly funded also have their work available to the public? Perhaps HR should have a GitHub repo for all of their communications?
Re: Public Money, Public Code
#74this has always puzzled me. Companies gets millions from the taxpayers to certain projects to develop their (something) Then another company get another million to develop same or similiar thing. Why it is not a required that if you get taxpayers' money, the results should be available for free to everyone, let's say after 12 months of grace perioid ??
Because that would be bad for society. It's important that money moves around as much as possible--every time it does, value is created. Think of it like the water cycle. By increasing the output of the sun (enacting laws to keep publicly-funded code private), we cause lots more money to evaporate from the taxpayer oceans (by solving the same problem repeatedly), and that in turn creates lots more fiscalonimbus cloud…
But the issue here is that taxpayer's money is never sufficient. If not used on software projects it could always be used to speed up public infrastructure building, increase salaries in important public jobs like healthcare or teaching, or any one of a billion things that would be far less wasteful and still put that money back into the economy.
Re: Public Money, Public Code
#75The province of British Columbia appears to have a massive open source presence: https://github.com/bcgov
Re: Public Money, Public Code
#76The largest branch of the Norwegian government, Labor and Welfare Administration (NAV), have adopted this this policy since 2018 and now we have over 2000 public repositories on https://github.com/navikt and https://github.com/nais (last one is our platform organization)
What if we, and hear me out, just stole Norway’s code? /a
Just comment out healthcare and a couple of other things and you’re good to go!
In reality though it would be possible to share code between cities, regions and even countries. Some use cases are fairly generic.
Re: Public Money, Public Code
#77I’ve heard those exact words from a government developer in Berlin and it felt really good to hear. Imagine making pull requests to improve government services! Some people would gladly do it.
Re: Public Money, Public Code
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you use small words and explain what about this would ever require that of Microsoft? I do not see it.
The entire video on the front page advocates for public organisations to only use software that is open source. > Mostly our administrations procure proprietary software, this means a lot of money goes into licenses that last for a limited amount of time, and restrict our rights. We aren’t allow to use our infrastructure in a reasonable way, and because the source code of proprietary software is usually a business se…
Videos never consider all necessary nuances. Did you read their brochure before making such strong conclusions about the whole project?
Re: Public Money, Public Code
#79I’ve heard those exact words from a government developer in Berlin and it felt really good to hear. Imagine making pull requests to improve government services! Some people would gladly do it.
Imagine getting 10,000 pull requests and 7 originate from KGB hackers that solve a real problem but contain a vulnerability.
Re: Public Money, Public Code
#80I’ve heard those exact words from a government developer in Berlin and it felt really good to hear. Imagine making pull requests to improve government services! Some people would gladly do it.
Imagine getting 10,000 pull requests and 7 originate from KGB hackers that solve a real problem but contain a vulnerability.
Why bother when KGB hackers can already find a dozen of vulnerabilities just by looking sideways at a closed source project built by the most well-meaning team?