Also: public money, public data. One can dream....
Whether you want all data the government has to be public depends heavily on whether you want private security forces to have all the same power as a police force.
Public Money, Public Code
111–120 of 156 posts
Re: Public Money, Public Code
#112How about Public Money, Public Data? For instance, there’s a whole industry around finding public legal information about companies. State’s websites offer throttled database access, some offer data for free, but most selling it for dozens of thousands of dollars (officially)
There should be a fee, but a fee equal to how much storage and access cost, so a very small one.
If you put no fee, some big actors will create non optimize crawlers and call the service in a loop, wasting your tax money.
A small fee means people will take care of only get exactly the data they need, cache what they need to cache, and refresh only if they really need to, and what they really need to.
Otherwise, it's the tragedy of the common.
Re: Public Money, Public Code
#113What could possibly be the arguments against this sort of thing?
Public money => Public code seems obvious to me.
Re: Public Money, Public Code
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!
This seems so obvious, it's crazy this isn't being done everywhere.
I think the main reason why this is not done actively in Germany, is missing people with expertise. Lots of old guys from the pre-internet era taking care of the technical systems. Unfortunately, the gov is not doing much to make at least official positions attractive to young programmers. And of course, if it's done by a contractor, they do not wat to share any code with the public.
Only somewhat positive example from the recent past is the Corona warning app: https://github.com/corona-warn-app
Re: Public Money, Public Code
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
Imagine contracting a company and their programmer is a KGB hacker and nobody is ever allowed to see the source code.
that's true, but, to be fair, it might be easier to order an anti-hacker CIA background check for a contracted company of 100+ employees, than for a 10,000 pseudo-anonymous github users.
Yeah, but how often do you perfom that check? In the end it is all about the code and whether it can be checked.
And I have to say my personal confidence in the quality of governmental code is higher if it is open source than if it wasn't — because I know some pretty paranoid people who would for sure check that could better than any contractor ever would.
Re: Public Money, Public Code
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it is actually produced by the federal government, it can’t be open source because it is already public domain. “Public money, public code” either refers, in the US, exclusively to state governments, or it applies to software developed under government contracts (and possibly other software purchased by government), not just software developed by the government itself.
I did my research and the public domain mandate for federal works apparently doesn't apply to the states. Some states actually enforce their copyrights and have whole licensing systems for state government-produced works. Isn't this a whole 1st Amendment violation? The law is intended for private parties and the 1st is incorporated to the states since a very long time. Has anyone sued over this?
The full text of the First Amendment is short:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Where is the connection to requiring anything to be put in the public domain?
Re: Public Money, Public Code
#117The 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)
I work for a nonprofit. Most of git repos are public but nobody cares. It's all pretty uninteresting.
Re: Public Money, Public Code
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
This seems so obvious, it's crazy this isn't being done everywhere.
I think the main reason why this is not done actively in Germany, is missing people with expertise. Lots of old guys from the pre-internet era taking care of the technical systems. Unfortunately, the gov is not doing much to make at least official positions attractive to young programmers. And of course, if it's done by a contractor, they do not wat to share any code with the public. Only somewhat positive example fr…
This might be because the government is a really unattractive employer both in terms of culture and remuneration.
However I have met some truly brilliant people working for the city of Berlin. They're just limited by red tape and diffusion of responsibilities, not to mention the amount of work that needs doing.
Opening the code up to pull requests could give the city IT a free boost from motivated citizens, I think.
Re: Public Money, Public Code
#119The 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)
I work for a nonprofit. Most of git repos are public but nobody cares. It's all pretty uninteresting.
is it uninteresting or just not scalable for a human to dig through; content vs index/search problem?
Re: Public Money, Public Code
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
GP wrote > 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.
Because pointing out that a slogan is simple and in-nuanced is unhelpful, and in bad faith. They're supposed to be simple. Slogans in a democracy are calls to action towards a general idea, and the more complicated they are the less people they can rally. Obviously the nuance will come when lawmakers actually put the thing into writing.