121–130 of 216 posts
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Your incentive is that you are being paid.
Imagine "Microsoft Office"-complexity software developed specifically for public sector. Then, sold to public sector once, then everyone else is free to use it. Would Microsoft still develops Office? Unlikely.
Expecting software to be open source is nice when there is an army of 10s of thousands of FAANG employees to constantly keep it up to date, but less so when there's limited people. Sure, it hypothetically could be kept up to date by the generous and capable people of the city after the fact, but that's farfetched. It isn't realistic or practical for a budget-conscious software company to open them selves up to scrutiny, participate in the open source community, accept bug fixes, do code reviews from strangers, etc. It's more expensive to do OSS, not less.
(As an example, the Linux Kernel is mainly made by large companies with lots of expensive employees. Pick your 10 favorite GitHub project with more than 10k stars and see who the primary contributors are.)
I know of several situations where entrepreneurs in europe put substantial money on the table in projects which were funded by grants from the government. It would be really bad for entrepreneurship in europe if it would be required to make software open source the moment some grant money is involved. Let's imagine you spend 500K of your savings, and the government gives you a 50K grant. Now you need to open source y…
It's more like if the tax office build a software to compute taxes, you can use it to compute your taxes, add a simplified a gui for basic users or incorporate it in your ERP.
Suppose you are on a committee where you are evaluating 3 different offers to build a website for your city. Bid A is for $10m, Bid B is for $9.5m, and Bid C is for $9m. The company that made offer B knows that they will likely lose the contract so they counter. "If you let us keep the source code and it remains private, we will bid $8.5m for the contract". Since all three vendors are offering equivalent service, and…
You still pay the company to develop and maintain the software. Same way as open source developers get "sponsored". The reason is that anyone who wants to see the code and suggest on how to make it better, or to report a bug, then that would be possible. Furthermore, that work can be reused by other parts of the government.
That last point is why some companies wouldn't want to do it, or would charge more. However, to your point, I think the increased cost is worth it in this case.
Sure, there are going to be less better roads/schools by 500k, but the problem with that money is that there are rarely big projects for that amount, so it's not like they would be put to best use without being "lost" in the process of relocation.
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I was tangentially related to the covid app stuff so I can offer some insight there: most of those apps weren't built by the state. Google provided an open-source "base app" that could be customized by the states, but most states hired third-party contractors to build an app for them. I've worked in public sector and this is typical. the states can't open source it because they don't own it, they just pay a third-par…
> but most states hired third-party contractors to build an app for them. So the states paid the bills so can license the result any way they want. How can they pay for something and not own it? Sounds to me like there are deep corruption problems
Cloud SAAS e.g. Salesforce apps
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I don't see what corruption has to do with it. I'm a subcontractor and usually the contractual terms are dictated by my clients. If I get the chance however, I put forth my terms and these say that I'm the author of the code and thus the copyright holder.
When I've done freelance work and have been able to write the contract, I include a clause that the client receives "a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, irrevocable license to reproduce, prepare derivative works of, publicly display, publicly perform, and distribute the work and such derivative works, and to sublicense any or all of the foregoing rights to third parties," effectively giving them unli…
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I can’t tell based on the information on the site, but there may be some nuance to the threshold where this becomes a requirement. I imagine it will not be an all or nothing situation, but I am not sure ultimately. Also, if there was a bunch of public code available because of grant funding, that means - in theory - many people might not have to invest their own money (or quite as much) because there is more out ther…
ah yes, in good european fashion, there will be all kinds of complicated and time consuming rules and processes. that is what the countries in the EU and the commission do best. make it nearly impossible for small bootstrapped companies to be competitive and get their shit done. and if I as an entrepreneur put money into something, I expect to own it. even if a grant was involved. after all, I already paid taxes to m…
I'm curious to see the nitty gritty here myself.
The state I lived in developed one of those covid tracking apps. I asked for the source code and was told it wasn't available and would never be. I talked to people working on other software developed for the state and they all think that software shouldn't be public. It seems crazy to me that taxpayers pay for this software but it doesn't belong to them. Knowing what I do know I gotta wonder if it's just about those…
My most recent job was for a local government, and even though I made a push for open sourcing our code, I never made much headway. Plus, literally all of the other devs on my team repeatedly committed secure credentials to git no matter how many times I tried to teach them how to use a .gitignore file, so it could have been a bit disastrous if my efforts had actually made any headway
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I was tangentially related to the covid app stuff so I can offer some insight there: most of those apps weren't built by the state. Google provided an open-source "base app" that could be customized by the states, but most states hired third-party contractors to build an app for them. I've worked in public sector and this is typical. the states can't open source it because they don't own it, they just pay a third-par…
> but most states hired third-party contractors to build an app for them. So the states paid the bills so can license the result any way they want. How can they pay for something and not own it? Sounds to me like there are deep corruption problems
Actually, quite easily, and it's cheaper that way (especially if they pay to acquire it, and it wasn't exclusively developed for them.)
Which is also why they would do that.
The state I lived in developed one of those covid tracking apps. I asked for the source code and was told it wasn't available and would never be. I talked to people working on other software developed for the state and they all think that software shouldn't be public. It seems crazy to me that taxpayers pay for this software but it doesn't belong to them. Knowing what I do know I gotta wonder if it's just about those…
This is the kind of issue that causes all that government bloat... If I was a state employee and I wrote the app, and I had to release the source code, then I'm making it very easy for a bad actor to find a vulnerability and exploit it to leak the data of citizens. One might respond: "Well software shouldn't have those holes! Just because it's closed source, doesn't mean that won't happen anyway Also true, in an idea…
I have spent a lot of time in public sector IT and I’ve rarely seen a management or information security team that didn't subscribe to this kind of security through obscurity thinking for internal code, including the management teams that were completely behind using open source code for cost, robustness, and avoiding vendor risk.