51–60 of 64 posts
This is cool, but can we call it something else? The People's * is a prefix used by totalitarian governments.
That's like saying straight people should refrain from using rainbows because they are used by the LGBT community.
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I'm pretty sure that, assuming you're a government employee, any work you create that would normally be covered by copyright as part of your job is public domain. There's no license legally possible.
Of course, this isn't the case when you are contracted by the government to develop software for them, which is a huge issue in my eyes. I'm not going to say let's ban shrinkwrapped software in the government (as much as I'd like to see everything the government uses be open source), but I think it's reasonable to require any contracted out to be released under on open license to the public, specifically because it I…
Shrinkwrapped software != bespoke software that is contracted to be developed for the government
IMO any software that is contracted to be developed by the government should be public domain, if the government "owns" the software then in reality the public "owns" it... after all the government is "for the people, by the people" right...
This does preclude the government from licensing the USE of software (like Windows, Office, etc) that is a completely different debate. However if the government is contracting with a company for the company to build custom software the exclusive use of the government they yes that should be Public domain.
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> The People's * is a prefix used by totalitarian governments. Indeed. And so are words like "homeland". The last ~2 decades have seen a widespread change in ideas about the relationship between the U.S. federal govt. and the people. As a result, practices that were once restricted to highly repressive states are now merely a bit controversial in the U.S. And then we also have these ways of naming things that you & I…
I keep watching older TV shows that aired when I was in the military and they keep using the term "War on Terror", which frankly, is something I'd never directly heard in the military (only from politicians) and it's surprising to me that anyone would say such a thing without reactively slapping themselves for gleefully eating up such confusion-inducing propaganda. I think some people just like talking like that.
A definitional enemy. Very newspeak.
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Want my email address? I'll just send FOIAs all day long through Muckrock if I know what I should be asking for (and pushing the results up to Github and the Internet Archive).
I already FOIA the shit out of government. I am 100% willing to help FOIA the right people for the right projects.
How can you (or we) ensure your FOIA request for code isn't responded to with a PDF of code?
Check out this guy's commit history: https://github.com/alex-perfilov-reisys?tab=overview
As a person outside the government, I'm concerned about some potential problems with this initiative: For one, Pull Requests: If a government agency gets a PR on some code, I'm concerned there may be pressure not to accept it: auditing requirements that are so high that nobody wants to review PRs (not that audits are bad!), or policies that otherwise don't encourage PRs, meaning that improvements don't get back to th…
She told me that many departments who don't currently have much experience in open source express the concern that if they open source their code, they've got to deal with all the issues that come with maintainership of an open source project.
Her opinion, though, was that the first and foremost reason for encouraging agencies to release their code is transparency and accountability - it's taxpayer money, after all - and that even chucking up a plain old tarball is a great start. As for running an open source community - well, cross that bridge when you get to it. It's entirely possible that no-one actually cares about contributing to your codebase. It's entirely possible that you're not going to have to deal with contributions larger than typo fixes. If you do end up getting larger contributions, write your policy and your process when you need it.
If you're in the parts of government that are encouraging a move towards openness, tell other agencies that it's fine if they don't have a fully developed open source strategy. Get their code up on GitHub somewhere first, prove that the sky won't fall in, and just get them comfortable with the concept of open source. Once we've achieved the first objective of getting source code out in the open at all, then we can worry about the rest.
I wonder to what degree this applies to the DC city government and if it can be made useful for municipalities generally.
How about we start with the source code for electronic voting machines?
And how would that help? How do you know that the code they published is the same as the code installed on those machines? You need voting machines that leave a paper trail (which the voter can verify while voting), that way the machines can provide quick results while the final results can be counted by hand.
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Want my email address? I'll just send FOIAs all day long through Muckrock if I know what I should be asking for (and pushing the results up to Github and the Internet Archive).
I already FOIA the shit out of government. I am 100% willing to help FOIA the right people for the right projects.
I think this is great. Maybe the code won't be reused, but it adds another dimension to governmental transparency, which is always a good thing. Furthermore, any code produced by the government is effectively being produced for the American people. We should have access to the code to use as we see fit. I wonder how this will affect bids for government software projects? Will companies be upset that they have to open…
I'm thinking this will probably not extend to the majority of code produced. Intuitively, I'm guessing the military produces the most code of any branch of the government. And I'm not sure i believe that we should all have access to that code to use as we see fit.
I can see the downsides though, like somebody publishing code with keys or credentials in it. That seems like a fairly likely error.