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It would certainly be interesting to make a pull request for something like Healthcare.gov or something. I wonder if it's measurable how much tax money we could save (if any) if we allowed the public to audit and improve our code.
Providing the source does not mean giving the public commit access.
It would certainly be interesting to make a pull request for something like Healthcare.gov or something. I wonder if it's measurable how much tax money we could save (if any) if we allowed the public to audit and improve our code.
Providing the source does not mean giving the public commit access.
The positive and optimistic side of this is well-documented. The darker side is that making all publicly-funded software public would also mean making all weapons software public. That could have disastrous consequences.
The UK government's cabinet papers fall under this: they won't be released for thirty years, but they will be released under the Open Government License.
I'm not sure that this is what the article is advocating, though.
Also of concern is a tragedy of commons like issue where those who contributed no funding are able to get the software for free. For example if a piece of city focused software is FOSS and then a bunch of other cities choose to consume it but not contribute to the funding or code.
Agreed the other cities are being a jerk but not exactly a tragedy of the commons [1] as OSS is not a rival good [2]. One city using the software does not prevent others from using it. [1] https://market.subwiki.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons [2] https://market.subwiki.org/wiki/Rival_good
The positive and optimistic side of this is well-documented. The darker side is that making all publicly-funded software public would also mean making all weapons software public. That could have disastrous consequences.
When I look at wars throughout the world, a huge number of them are fought with US weapons, and we don't actually have a good track record of supporting peaceful people. I don't think that we'll get there until we stop dumping weapons on the world for profit.
1. healthcare.gov
2. Stoplights/traffic control cameras.
3. Voting machines.
4. Electrical grid.
5. IRS.
I am an open source advocate, but I don't really agree here. Should the IRS, NSA, CIA, and FBI code all be open source? Here are some cases where closed source software, with some security by obscurity could be helpful. Another example would be some software around designing nuclear systems. But as an example maybe a software funded by the national weather service to run simulations, that aught to be open source (per…
> Should the IRS, NSA, CIA, and FBI code all be open source? Yes. Open source, but secret/classified (as necessary, IRS software should be open-source, period). This way the software will be a useful learning/historical resource when it's declassified in the future.
I don't trust it to be built or maintained properly, which also means I'm relatively sure it'd be open season for troves of people who want to do bad things.
Open Source is great - but sometimes it makes absolutely no sense.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Should the IRS, NSA, CIA, and FBI code all be open source? Yes. Open source, but secret/classified (as necessary, IRS software should be open-source, period). This way the software will be a useful learning/historical resource when it's declassified in the future.
Also, electronic voting. Not that electronic voting booths will ever be a good idea, but forcing them to open source their stuff will hopefully deter people from even trying (and if not it will make it even more blatantly visible that these things are terrible). It's just like the biggest argument for open source in science: it is required for proper accountability.