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Public Money, Public Code

publiccode.eu

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Re: Public Money, Public Code

#201

Post by prepend »

toomanybeersies wrote: post #172
inChargeOfIT wrote: post #118

The US is getting better about it, some more than others, but a few off the top of my head.. https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs https://github.com/nationalsecurityagency https://github.com/GSA https://github.com/CMSgov https://github.com/CDCgov

You missed the 18F Github org [1], also from the GSA. I wonder if there's a directory of government Github orgs somewhere? [1] https://github.com/18F

Yes, there’s https://government.github.com/community/

And GSA keeps a list, sort of, of all the US gov projects at code.gsa.gov. But the code activity got defunded a year or two ago and no longer updates a consolidated catalog and now just points to all the various departments.

Re: Public Money, Public Code

#202

Post by prepend »

bumper_crop wrote: post #122

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…

This is not possible as the requirement either forces OSS or doesn’t. Bidders can’t alter the requirements without the contract changing and everyone rebidding.

Imagine a contract for a road that requires maintenance and the 9.5M bidder offers to lower by a million if they don’t provide maintenance.

Re: Public Money, Public Code

#203

Post by unnah »

jasonkester wrote: post #179
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not understanding what you said, do you mean you had built the code before and you licensed it to the government, or in the contract you wrote to the government you specified that you owned the code that you were delivering, every time I've written code for people who've paid me on a project basis they can do what they want with the code afterwards, including give it away.

You could certainly ask for the right to redistribute the code when we were negotiating the contract. But that would get you a much larger quote since now you wouldn’t just be buying the software, you’d also have to be paying for every potential future sale of something similar. I can’t imagine that the government (or anybody really) would do that.

I suppose it depends on the market. I have been involved in a number of contracts to develop bespoke software for big private sector companies. Twenty years ago they were happy to just buy usage rights, but since then the customers have grown wiser to their leverage and keep insisting that if they pay for the development work, they get to keep the rights to the results. It's different if the vendor already has IP that can be licensed to the customer to substantially reduce the development cost of the bespoke solution.

Re: Public Money, Public Code

#204

Post by prepend »

Dracophoenix wrote: post #182

This would be a perfect motto for property tax assessments. It is ridiculous that no one has any idea if the value of their home is inflated/deflated by software or reflects a consistent correlation with a measurable value.

My county purchased a service that automatically estimated values. It was a black box to them. During my appeal, they weren’t able to describe how it chose to raise property assessments on which properties as it wasn’t done on every house. They wouldn’t even reveal the vendor. They were getting a ton of appeals because they switched from a manual, poorly coordinated process to an automated process powered by a third party.

It was very frustrating because the citizen review board accepted the appraiser’s number even though they couldn’t describe the methods and even though I brought dozens of comps showing a lower price and valuation of actual sales. They fixated on the number that the software produced.

I think if software should be used like this it needs to be auditable and at least source available, if not foss.

Re: Public Money, Public Code

#205

Post by prepend »

WaitWaitWha wrote: post #20
postalrat wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They would develop Office because they were paid to develop office.

Also, government custom developed software is really wonky and the odds that the IP is sold is very low. The greater odds are that maintenance and follow on contracts will only be possible for the company that first wrote the software.

Re: Public Money, Public Code

#206

Post by deknos »

LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #154
KarlKemp wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The German version is at https://github.com/corona-warn-app . It was expensive (18 million Euros I believe, but may be wrong). But other than that, it was excellent from start to finish. First release a few weeks after the API was available. The source was divided into logical components of more or less perfect size, it was straightforward, well commented, responsive to PRs, worked, and had no security issues as far…

Hrm. Why tee eff shops downtown insisted on that Luca thing with Smudos blessing instead? PR? Federalism? Panic? Incompetence?

besides the three you named: lobbying and corruption i think

Re: Public Money, Public Code

#207

Post by sylware »

not enough: lean and simple, but able to do a good enough job, open source software/protocols, including SDKs (that exclude de-facto complex syntax languages with their compilers).

Off-course the reality of a complete and reasonable functional software stack is actually made of several technical contexts and drawing the complexity lines at the right sweet spots is hard: mistakes will be made, due to the permanent/long-term toxic brain-washing/lobbying of big tech, and they will be "not free" to fix.

Big tech wants to make you hard dependent on all their software and servers to create a permanent flow of money, which is much harder/impossible to do with centralized-server-less or local and independant software.

Boiling frog strategy: for that, they have huge funding (blackrock/vanguard/etc) in order to make their companies (microsoft/google/etc) super cheap/free for a very long time and to suffocate competition over time which has less cash flow (those funds have thousands of billions of $). They will create server centralized services, with crippled user-side open source software (not really usable without their servers). They call that "software as a service".

That said, some of them will manage to keep their "services" free selling user data to brokers and selling ads.

The control of user-side software is via open source grotesque and absurde complexity and size: google(blink(~webkit)/geeko) and apple(webkit) based browsers with their compilers. They know only their army of devs can maintain it, and they have enough control to do planned obsolescence there as a bonus.

Well, this is not very well explained, but I think it is enough to get the idea.

Re: Public Money, Public Code

#208

Post by ksec »

I like the word Public Code and not Open Source, since modern definition of Open Source requires a community around it.

But what license should this Public Code be? GPL like? AGPL? or Apache 2.0 and BSD like?

Re: Public Money, Public Code

#209

Post by gehwartzen »

munk-a wrote: post #135
gehwartzen wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not in software so maybe my viewpoint is just different but I also wouldn't expect NASA to give me the mechanical blueprints for a rocket, or even a concrete launch pad nor would I expect the local government to give me the the electrical schematics for the stop light systems, even though doing so would in no way prevent them from continuing to use these systems/items

Honestly, why not? It's quite likely there has been a decent amount of information passing back and forth between NASA and various private space companies - there isn't a sane reason to require everyone to make the same mistakes that you've already learned from. Additionally while releasing rocket specifications probably won't result in any at-scale replicas it's a good way to feed the hobbiest community and possibly…

I agree with you and would love more "real world" things to be open source. I do like the ethos within software/tech that things are open-sourced often. It doesn't exist to nearly the same degree in many other "physical world" type industries.

I think government/ bureaucracy moves slowly and most people working within them don't come from a software background so a lot of the older norms of not sharing things (outside of things like data/documents) is just the way things are done. I expect to a lot of these people sharing a source code is treated exactly the same as sharing any other mechanical designs which they just often don't do.

Hopefully both things will change.

Re: Public Money, Public Code

#210

Post by hackandtrip »

postalrat wrote: post #10

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…

The Italian version is fully public, and it was made by a third party which offered to do it free of charge.

https://github.com/immuni-app

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