101–110 of 156 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Imagine getting 10,000 pull requests and 7 originate from KGB hackers that solve a real problem but contain a vulnerability.
Imagine contracting a company and their programmer is a KGB hacker and nobody is ever allowed to see the source code.
There are a lot of good reasons to do this, even if it's just better interop between different branches of the government, all cool. However, you then realize that the military is funded by public money. I'd wager you don't want fighter jet or missile guidance software to be open source. The idea is way too simplistic and lacks nuance.
Great, now use that clearly specialized use case to drive public policy for every single common use case. There is such a thing as bad faith arguments. By default everything public paid should be open sourced, if there are cases exception is needed like military then exceptions can be made on application basis.
> The idea is way too simplistic and lacks nuance.
and you wrote
> There is such a thing as bad faith arguments.
Why is it a bad faith argument? GP clearly admitted that no straight forward solution that treats every case the same is going to be good. That is the same you argued for.
The 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)
The 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
To actually get meaningful benefit from it you need to design it with multiple use-cases and deployment models in mind, document it, and build a community around it.
If you have a bunch of publicly-funded teams that are desperate to do that work but held back by rules saying their code has to be private then forcing it public is a huge win.
But actually I think most such teams are just trying to get their project off the ground or keep it alive. If you make them publish the code they'll do so and then carry on developing an undocumented system that solves their exact usecase and none other, and is tightly coupled to their particular production environment.
I think to really get open-source happening successfully you actually need to foster a culture that values and incentivises the extra work it entails.
Nonetheless, this would be a great first step. So bravo!
I’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.
The Labor and Welfare Administration (NAV) of the Norwegian government is doing exactly that, we have been opening up our code since 2018 and are accepting pull requests across our 2000 public repositories from those who want to improve government services https://github.com/navikt this has also enabled a much more close collaboration between new and existing partners that was previously unheard of!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why not? Governments routinely propose policies that are clearly “too far” and then “compromise” to their actual goals — eg, restrictions on civil rights. Why wouldn’t the same tactic work for activists?
This is exactly the tactic unions always used. Probably one of the causes of unions' global demise are their overtly unreslistic campaigns.
By legalizing narrow avenues for union conduct, we have also heavily disincentivized any behavior outside those avenues. The "fat cat" union reps that live off your dues without contributing anything meaningful to your rights are ultimately an intentional creation of this de-radicalization. Incidentally the Red Scare helped quite a bit by making unions scared of seeming "too leftist" when the existence of unions itself is born out of a leftist understanding of class conflict (not "class" as in how much money you have but "class" as in whether you have to work for a living or people pay you for what you already own).
