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Switzerland now requires all government software to be open source

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31–40 of 44 posts

Re: Switzerland now requires all government software to be open source

#31
post #3

Obvious strategy to reduce legaö risks like the postmaster debacle.

For anyone who has not heard of the “postmaster debacle”, as I; it is a stunning atrocity of government that appears to have affected 3,650 people who were hounded and persecuted and prosecuted for various types of theft and malfeasance even though it was a glitch in the Fujitsu software that caused whatever appeared to have been thefts or irregularities in the accounting that was the basis for the government tyranni…

> I suspect this also has its roots in the European legal tendency to presume guilt and the accused having to prove their innocence

This scandal took place in the UK, though, not in a European civil code jurisdiction. The concept of "presumption of innocence" originates in English common law.

Re: Switzerland now requires all government software to be open source

#32

Sounds great. Except that as a company, you can now only deliver services to this government. No products, since you will lose your competitive advantage. This is a big disadvantage for for instance startups that target this market.

It’s a disadvantage if you require proprietary licenses, but an advantage if you leverage open source licenses.

Re: Switzerland now requires all government software to be open source

#33
post #15

The US government, especially the military, is largely allergic to software. This is slowly starting to change, but only in small pockets. I am aware of three software teams in the military but they are highly specialized with small dedicated customers. I have tried several times to get Node.js into the military on approved software lists for internal development and its a huge struggle. I suspect the main culprits a…

But is node worth it without the npm packages? I feel like it's pretty much one of the worst runtimes/scripting languages if you can't utilize it's ecosystem.

Yes, absolutely. I can manually import the 2-3 packages I regularly use. TypeScript, for example, has no dependencies. The only thing I would miss is ESLint which has a billion dependencies that I wouldn't bother with.

Re: Switzerland now requires all government software to be open source

#34

The US government, especially the military, is largely allergic to software. This is slowly starting to change, but only in small pockets. I am aware of three software teams in the military but they are highly specialized with small dedicated customers. I have tried several times to get Node.js into the military on approved software lists for internal development and its a huge struggle. I suspect the main culprits a…

This is actually really scary that you want NPM in the military... Thank god that I trust - this was denied - smart move.

I don't. I want Node available to write systems automation without dependency on OS specific code. I don't need NPM to make effective use of Node.

Re: Switzerland now requires all government software to be open source

#35

The US government, especially the military, is largely allergic to software. This is slowly starting to change, but only in small pockets. I am aware of three software teams in the military but they are highly specialized with small dedicated customers. I have tried several times to get Node.js into the military on approved software lists for internal development and its a huge struggle. I suspect the main culprits a…

Sorry, but I'm glad they are not open to node. Why would you want node within the militaries network?

To quickly spin up OS-agnostic systems automation.

Re: Switzerland now requires all government software to be open source

#36

The US government, especially the military, is largely allergic to software. This is slowly starting to change, but only in small pockets. I am aware of three software teams in the military but they are highly specialized with small dedicated customers. I have tried several times to get Node.js into the military on approved software lists for internal development and its a huge struggle. I suspect the main culprits a…

If you can piggyback on an existing system, you may only need to pursue using the RMF assess only process with the gaining system owner. Once the assess only process is approved, the hardware, software and PPSM in the gaining system would be updated to reflect the new components. Those approved software lists don’t get updated very quickly. Using an assess only process may move things ahead more quickly.

Re: Switzerland now requires all government software to be open source

#37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you had to select a single programming language, for US government agencies to use, which one would you pick?

go or java, in that order

Thank you for your reply. If you were asked develop a web application using Go, how would you go about doing it?

Re: Switzerland now requires all government software to be open source

#38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

go or java, in that order

Thank you for your reply. If you were asked develop a web application using Go, how would you go about doing it?

I would assume he would use HTMX, being the creator of it.

Re: Switzerland now requires all government software to be open source

#39
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for your reply. If you were asked develop a web application using Go, how would you go about doing it?

I would assume he would use HTMX, being the creator of it.

Thank you

Re: Switzerland now requires all government software to be open source

#40
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for your reply. If you were asked develop a web application using Go, how would you go about doing it?

I would assume he would use HTMX, being the creator of it.

Yeah, go w/ htmx + vanillajs (or possibly alpine.js or https://github.com/gnat/surreal) would be a reasonable option for many government projects. You can audit the htmx codebase and it is dependency free (same w/ alpine & surreal) and self-host everything, go compiles to a single binary for deployment.
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