121–130 of 156 posts
How 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)
this 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 ??
> 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 ?? Probably depends on the development in question, but in general the ability to resell something to someone else changes the calculations for contract work. If you want me to develop something and then own it is not the same deal as me developing something tha…
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.
Imagine getting 10,000 pull requests and 7 originate from KGB hackers that solve a real problem but contain a vulnerability.
[0] example with the Linux kernel: https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/22/22398156/university-minne...
I 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.
There will be ignorant arguments against this due to cyber security concerns, enemy nations benefiting from the code, the copyrights of the people/companies who are being paid to write the code, etc., etc.
I can't tell if this is sarcasm or genuine sentiment.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand the argument. Municipalities / counties have many common software needs. If they collaborated on open source software we would likely get higher quality services at lower cost, what's bad about that?
Is them cooperating on open source software a realistic outcome? Or will there be many small, unmaintainable, slightly different, open projects? Why are they not already collaborating on closed source software? Looking at the mess of customizations asked for software by companies doing the same thing, I can't imagine it would be different for counties/municipalities. (edit: Please don't misunderstand, I am not agains…
A. Most people in government positions don't know/care about open source. Nobody will educate them for the following reasons.
B. Most private implementors don't want to open source stuff because it will make easier for other companies to study their code, making it easy for them to get contracts for updates to that code. Avoiding open source in general also increases the total cost so more profit for the implementing party (fe selling also Oracle licenses is much better than using postgresql)
C. Code in the open is easier to be audited by hackers for exploits. This is even more problematic because government code is supported by private contracts and may be left unsopported for some time due to bureaucracy.
D. This is the most important. Open sourcing projects opens the door for cost auditing. We've seen crazy things like simple CMSs costing millions of euros. Although these may be simple wordpress sites, they get away with them because they can say that they are custom implemented, have huge back office etc. Open sourcing them will reveal the scam.
Source: I work in a public sector organisation in an EU country and have dealt many times with projects by outside contractors.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
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.
Imagine getting 10,000 pull requests and 7 originate from KGB hackers that solve a real problem but contain a vulnerability.
many bug fixes open new bugs anyway due to poor architecture, this is what we should focus on
the prc is a greater threat than Russia anyway
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.
Wow, even using "Russians under the bed" to attack FOSS now.