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If Software Is Funded from a Public Source, Its Code Should Be Open Source

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Re: If Software Is Funded from a Public Source, Its Code Should Be Open Source

#111

Post by hinkley »

GlenTheMachine wrote: post #91

Government scientist here. IANAL, but my understanding is that all software written by US government civil servants is in the public domain. It cannot be copyrighted or otherwise licensed (although the government can patent things). This does not necessarily mean that it is available to the public, as noted in the other comments; it may be classified, considered For Official Use Only, or restricted from release by IT…

Lawyers for at least some multinationals get hives when you talk about public domain software. I've had to switch libraries or participate in cleanrooming a single PD function a couple times to get them to calm down.

Apparently in Europe and some other places it's not so easy to disavow all rights to a bit of software. BSD- or MIT-style licenses are much more comforting.

Re: If Software Is Funded from a Public Source, Its Code Should Be Open Source

#112

Post by jacquesm »

zbruhnke wrote: post #108
jacquesm wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagreed, safety and essential infrastructure should definitely be open source. Right now your typical infrastructure project is about as leaky as they come compared to a typical web app. Exposing that stuff to broad daylight will certainly help to harden it.

I wish I had as much faith in the government as you ... then again as a resident of the netherlands I suppose you might have reason to have more faith than I do in the US? In principle I completely agree that things being in the open should help to harden them, but especially in the US where funding is often used as a bargaining chip and bureaucracy is rampant I get a bit nervous

Then you're essentially ceding the ground to the bad guys.

Re: If Software Is Funded from a Public Source, Its Code Should Be Open Source

#113

Post by rhacker »

PurpleBoxDragon wrote: post #56
zbruhnke wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man it would be pretty amazing to be able to submit a Pull Request to the IRS. Matt Cutts if you're reading this please help! On another note, I'm not sure I agree on the electrical grid or traffic controls being open sourced ... could imagine some nefarious things happening as a result of that

By hiding the code, it makes security through obscurity far more possible. If you force the code to be public, very poor security will be discovered far faster and be more of an issue to the public. While this will also make abusing security flaws easier, I think there is also a real benefit to forcing it to be public that could potentially outweigh the risks of doing such.

An alternative would be to rebuild these from scratch, not using any existing code, but start (and always continue) in the open.

Re: If Software Is Funded from a Public Source, Its Code Should Be Open Source

#114

Post by i_phish_cats »

GlenTheMachine wrote: post #91

Government scientist here. IANAL, but my understanding is that all software written by US government civil servants is in the public domain. It cannot be copyrighted or otherwise licensed (although the government can patent things). This does not necessarily mean that it is available to the public, as noted in the other comments; it may be classified, considered For Official Use Only, or restricted from release by IT…

Anything written by federal contractors, and anything written with state funds are not in the public domain. National labs flat out refuse to release some of their source code.

Re: If Software Is Funded from a Public Source, Its Code Should Be Open Source

#115

Post by throwawaymath »

vanderZwan wrote: post #66
ganoushoreilly wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the code in electronic voting is owned by the vendors though so by the same standard would we have to open source any 3rd party software the govt aquires?

I don't quite follow your line of thinking here: - currently most electronic voting software is owned by the vendors - electronic voting should really not be trusted, period, but definitely not be allowed to be closed source - therefore, we should ban any electronic voting software not made on open source software (arguably even hardware) - therefore, I am implying vendors of electronic voting software should only be…

That's a lot more involved and domain-specific than the question of whether or not government-owned code should be open source.

The person you're responding to is just making the positive observation that, since electronic voting software is licensed - not produced - by the government, you can't mandate it be open sourced via e.g. a FOIA request.

You are making a normative declaration that it should be open sourced because it's important and intrinsically untrusted software, and as a consequence it either will be or electronic voting won't be possible. These are separate things. You're talking about what ought to be, the other commenter is talking about what (currently) is.

Re: If Software Is Funded from a Public Source, Its Code Should Be Open Source

#116

Post by sametmax »

mountainofdeath wrote: post #107
ar_lan wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to work in a state government job as a student intern, and they said they wanted an internal directory for some various tasks. You can think of it like an inventory manager sort of website, purely on our intranet. The mad lad my lead was, said we would need a database for retaining some of the basic data we needed to keep track of. Nothing all that special, just a few tables, and by nature nothing sensitive wo…

Shh... Don't tell them that stuff like SQLite _is_ a flat-file database.

Besides, if you code your own database, at one point from a file to postgres, is it going to get rejected ?

Re: If Software Is Funded from a Public Source, Its Code Should Be Open Source

#117

Post by uberman »

tracker1 wrote: post #72
uberman wrote: post #14

Would this not imply that if "my" government funded some software that "your" government would be free to take it? I'm not sure I'm keen on subsidizing "your" government all that much. What would stop the people of/under "your" government from freeloading off the people of/under "my" government?

So, if YOUR government uses Linux, but doesn't participate in Linux development, it's bad for everyone else? Most Linux users aren't contributing to Linux itself. And likely less than half are making any significant contribution to Open Source Software at all. It's still useful software, and I still appreciate everyone that does work on it.

You seem to be conflating my position on the use of public funds with your position on open source in general.

"So, if YOUR government uses Linux, but doesn't participate in Linux development, it's bad for everyone else?"

I'm not sure where you are going with this. I certainly never claimed that governments should not use open source software. By all means I hope (for argument sake let's call it The US) leverages Linux where practical.

What I disagree with is the premise that The US or their contractors owe pull requests or public repos to the peoples of the world just because the US taxpayer partly or fully funded a development project. Hate on me if you must but I believe that no US funded research results be they in software or any other IP are or should be automatically owed to the peoples of the earth.

"Most Linux users aren't contributing to Linux itself. And likely less than half are making any significant contribution to Open Source Software at all. It's still useful software, and I still appreciate everyone that does work on it."

Yes, I agree with your idea that most open source users are freeloading in the sense that they contribute far less than they use. That is part of my point.

Re: If Software Is Funded from a Public Source, Its Code Should Be Open Source

#118

Post by AndrewKemendo »

GlenTheMachine wrote: post #91

Government scientist here. IANAL, but my understanding is that all software written by US government civil servants is in the public domain. It cannot be copyrighted or otherwise licensed (although the government can patent things). This does not necessarily mean that it is available to the public, as noted in the other comments; it may be classified, considered For Official Use Only, or restricted from release by IT…

I'm joining the Air Force as a Civilian with the explicit purpose of solving this. In fact we've made a lot of progress with Continuous ATO and some other efforts to get faster iteration, deployment, sharing CI/CD etc... processes in place.

It's going to take time but we're on the right track. Send me a message if you want to be involved in this culture change.

Re: If Software Is Funded from a Public Source, Its Code Should Be Open Source

#119

Post by sokoloff »

sametmax wrote: post #116
mountainofdeath wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shh... Don't tell them that stuff like SQLite _is_ a flat-file database.

Besides, if you code your own database, at one point from a file to postgres, is it going to get rejected ?

"Is this system a database?"

"No sir! It's just a base of data."

"Very well; carry on then..."

Re: If Software Is Funded from a Public Source, Its Code Should Be Open Source

#120

Post by sametmax »

zbruhnke wrote: post #42
kerkeslager wrote: post #36

Most posts on this thread are focusing on exceptional cases where there are obvious reasons not to open the source, such as defense, but huge amounts of publicly-funded code is locked up for no reason whatsoever. Let's discuss some use cases that make more sense: 1. healthcare.gov 2. Stoplights/traffic control cameras. 3. Voting machines. 4. Electrical grid. 5. IRS.

Man it would be pretty amazing to be able to submit a Pull Request to the IRS. Matt Cutts if you're reading this please help! On another note, I'm not sure I agree on the electrical grid or traffic controls being open sourced ... could imagine some nefarious things happening as a result of that

The french equivalent of the IRS did open up their software: https://github.com/GouvernementFR/calculette-impots-m-source...

Everybody got very enthousiastic at the begining, then realized:

- it was written in a niche proprietary language: M

- it was provided with almost zero doc or comments

- the process of getting the code was tedious, and the law changes every year

- taxes are complicated

And so nobody did anything with it ever since.

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