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Petition: Public Money Should Produce Public Code

creativecommons.org

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Re: Petition: Public Money Should Produce Public Code

#31

Post by kilotaras »

ptero wrote: post #23

The intent is good and I hope we find a good way to implement this. I do see pitfalls though: I would separate ownership (i.e., one cannot patent the code developed with public money -- IMO a good idea) and visibility (showing the code on request -- IMO a very dangerous one). My big concern is formalizing things that should be left informal. For example, in applied research, we usually build a number of throwaway pro…

> one cannot patent the code developed with public money

Code can't be patented in EU anyway.

Re: Petition: Public Money Should Produce Public Code

#32

Post by shanear »

Wholeheartedly agree. There is a big push do this inside the US federal government right now. I work for the United States Digital Service, and at the Department of Veterans' Affairs, almost all application code we write is open source:

https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs

This push is happening in other agencies as well. Check out https://code.gov/ for other shared projects from agencies around the federal government.

Re: Petition: Public Money Should Produce Public Code

#34

Post by burkemw3 »

ptero wrote: post #21
zero_shift wrote: post #2

One counter argument: national taxes shouldn't be used to produce code that could benefit other countries, unless that is recognised as a kind of international aid. (Not my opinion, but one I can imagine from certain political quarters)

Care to elaborate on reasoning? National taxes IMO should be used to (produce code that) benefit citizens of that nation. Who else benefits as a consequence is irrelevant. Doing this efficiently, especially in software with its low replication costs, often means opening your systems for the world to use (fix, improve, buy), but even if not, considering the benefit of others as a detriment to you is almost never optim…

I have heard from people that military strength (including force projection) and intelligence gathering benefits a nation.

Releasing the code (and thus methods) related to that strength would decrease some of those benefits.

I am not trying to comment on the validity of using military and intelligence gathering as tools in national benefit. I do, however, consider the US federal expenditures on military and intelligence gathering as a partial proxy for others' thoughts.

Re: Petition: Public Money Should Produce Public Code

#35

Post by sabujp »

Unfortunately this doesn't work in public education where it is most needed. All the companies pushing content to the kids, e.g. i-ready, st-math, while they may be "non-profit" do not share their code or source materials. What's worse is often their licenses only last for 1 year and have to be renewed again.

Re: Petition: Public Money Should Produce Public Code

#37

Post by maxxxxx »

rvanmil wrote: post #15

I've seen quite some code which was paid for by public money. If this would actually happen it would mostly just expose a tremendous shitheap of "enterprise" code created by consulting firms whose entire business model is based on delivering and "maintaining" overengineered crap with huge maintenance costs.

This is the same code most big companies run on. It definitely would be good to make it public.

Re: Petition: Public Money Should Produce Public Code

#38

Post by nunobrito »

zero_shift wrote: post #2

One counter argument: national taxes shouldn't be used to produce code that could benefit other countries, unless that is recognised as a kind of international aid. (Not my opinion, but one I can imagine from certain political quarters)

Talking for what happens in EU right now, not everything gets released as open source. Some public funded software has restrictions in regards to which geographies it can be provided.

What matters is that most orgs should make an effort to release as much code as they possibly can.

For example, the tools to access a public API should have an official repository with tools so they are the most complete and up to date.

A positive side-effect of these public projects is finding talent. I've seen it happen that contributors to an open source project will end up working on a EU space agency because they already met other developers and tech being used there.

Re: Petition: Public Money Should Produce Public Code

#39

Post by _joel »

d4rti wrote: post #33

Much of gov.uk is open source https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/service-standard/make-all-...

It's unfortunate that large public sector orgs in the UK are going more in for AWS and their proprietry pieces such as DynamoDB though. Also more crazy when they (AWS) pay very little corporation tax and one of the orgs is in charge of collecting tax

Re: Petition: Public Money Should Produce Public Code

#40

Post by alexanderstears »

burkemw3 wrote: post #34
ptero wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to elaborate on reasoning? National taxes IMO should be used to (produce code that) benefit citizens of that nation. Who else benefits as a consequence is irrelevant. Doing this efficiently, especially in software with its low replication costs, often means opening your systems for the world to use (fix, improve, buy), but even if not, considering the benefit of others as a detriment to you is almost never optim…

I have heard from people that military strength (including force projection) and intelligence gathering benefits a nation. Releasing the code (and thus methods) related to that strength would decrease some of those benefits. I am not trying to comment on the validity of using military and intelligence gathering as tools in national benefit. I do, however, consider the US federal expenditures on military and intellige…

Obviously there's tension between releasing code and protecting security interests.

Maybe it'd be better to say that public money should produce public code by default and we'd put the onus on agencies and elected officials to exempt projects from the requirement.

Should the VA publish their record keeping software? Seems sensible. Should we publish the microcontroller code for ICBM guidance systems? I think the status quo of classifying that information is working out well enough.

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