The U.S. Digital Service (USDS) has a number of open source repos: https://github.com/usds
I don't think it's everything they work on, but it's a step in the right direction.
Public Money, Public Code
131–140 of 156 posts
Re: Public Money, Public Code
#132I think there should be some important balance in this:
1. What exactly do we mean by open source here? Some of the benefits would even come with a source-available model. Others would need actual permissive licensing.
2. Some public sector funding is strategic in the sense that the government wants to fund developments in some particular sector of the economy to help bootstrap the strategic industry (for instance the space sector in the UK works a lot like this). In this case its not clear what advantage there would be in mandatory open sourcing... But perhaps say you can keep it closed for 12 months after the end of the funding, then mandatory open sourcing? Gives a 12 month head start seems generous enough.
3. There is a reasonable argument when bidding on a contract where a vendor says: we won't implement this from scratch, but we will fund this by selling the same solution to other customers, and as such we can deliver this cheaper than other bidders but only as closed source. This seems valid (i.e. its a build vs buy decision essentially) and I think government organisations that have real budgets will need to make these tradeoffs occasionally. But perhaps there should be a mandated minimum discount that needs to be achieved (i.e. we're willing to pay 25% more for an open source solution, if you can't outbid that then we are obliged to choose a more expensive but open source supplier).
Re: Public Money, Public Code
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
is it uninteresting or just not scalable for a human to dig through; content vs index/search problem?
I read uninteresting as not very very useful for an external party in general. It was likely developed for an organization's fairly unique needs, is probably not very well documented, and there's no community in the sense that most genuinely useful open source projects have. Dumping a big one-off repo of code is fine but probably no one's going to put the work into seeing if this project that was never intended to be…
Exactly this. It's like our websites and some other tools for our particular needs. We have, on rare occasion, gotten PRs from earnest supporters but they have no idea what our product needs are and we can't just merge in stuff that nobody asked for and hasn't been tested.
Re: Public Money, Public Code
#134Earlier 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…
If they collaborated today that would mean a lot of active coordination required.
And only municipalities in the collaboration can benefit. If they just open sourced what they have this collaboration could grow more organically.
Of course large scale software collaboration isn't impossible without open source. But my impression is that it greatly simplifies it.
Besides, if the software is open source, other non public actors can also benefit from it.
Re: Public Money, Public Code
#135There are four reasons this is difficult to actually work: 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 i…
You point out that things are not as they should be and argue that changing them will be hard, because that's how they are... to me, these points are a great motivation to introduce the legislature:
A. Such initiatives make government aware of the value of open-source systems to the public.
B. Ok, then this legislature would contribute to the reduction of inequality.
C. Better to fix bugs early than wait until they have catastrophic consequences.
D. Are you saying that we should let bad things continue happening?
Re: Public Money, Public Code
#136Terrific. I like it. Talking points are spot on.
FWIW, I've used the term "citizen-owned software" for the same concept.
On the stump, every one just grokked "citizen-owned software". 15 years ago, I ran for office, advocating election integrity ("private voting, public counting"). Including replacing COTS with FOSS. My audiences were donors, politicos, editorial boards, and lots and lots of normal people. Explaining "FOSS" was a non-starter, so I switched to "citizen-owned software", which needed no explaining.
Happy hunting.
Re: Public Money, Public Code
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
By enforcing copyright law, states restrict the freedom of speech of their citizens by prohibiting/going after certain kinds of expression (someone relying the state government's own speech is in itself speech)
In order to not be unconstitutional, therefore, copyright law should be interpreted as not protecting state works.
Re: Public Money, Public Code
#138There are four reasons this is difficult to actually work: 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 i…
You point out that things are not as they should be and argue that changing them will be hard, because that's how they are... to me, these points are a great motivation to introduce the legislature: A. Such initiatives make government aware of the value of open-source systems to the public. B. Ok, then this legislature would contribute to the reduction of inequality. C. Better to fix bugs early than wait until they h…
A. Few people outside of tech care; this won't bring votes.
B. Yes but the private contractors like the current status quo. More profit for them.
C. It's not always possible. Bureaucracy is a very big factor in such cases and it can't be fixed.
D. Of course not. The thing is that there are a lot of people that "profit" from this situation. And unfortunately these are more or less the same people that can decide in favour of making the open source everything move. And because of A there won't be much pressure for changes.
Re: Public Money, Public Code
#139There are four reasons this is difficult to actually work: 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 i…
A, Not my experience.
B, Because they're chasing the market valuation of software companies, not services / consulting companies.
C, Untrue.
D, Sure. Revolving door promotions, conflict of interest, yadda yadda. More reason to advocate FOSS.
Re: Public Money, Public Code
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It’s an application for a CMS, but they probably already have them.
Local newspapers, for instance, use CMSes too but there’s still a lot of random bespoke work that goes into them.