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Public Money, Public Code

publiccode.eu

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61–70 of 216 posts

Re: Public Money, Public Code

#61

Post by pooper »

HideousKojima wrote: post #57
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…

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

> 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

Why do they even need to have access to production secure credentials during development? Why not let them fall into the "pit of success" so local development never talks to a production server anywhere?

Re: Public Money, Public Code

#62

Post by figassis »

I'm wondering. If the govt pays you to build software, and you use include proprietary libraries in order to build a custom solution, so that the solution is owned by the government, should you open source everything incl. the proprietary components? I get the feeling that is what contractors are trying to avoid so they can keep their competitive advantages. That and hiding horrible code.

Re: Public Money, Public Code

#63

Post by krisoft »

reillyse wrote: post #49

Large consulting companies like Accenture have entire divisions of their business devoted to "government". These divisions make money by developing software for governments. It is very much against their interest for this software to be open source because 1) there is visibility into their performance and 2) they can't sell very similar software to the same government if everyone knows what software they've already b…

> These are the real vested interests preventing this code becoming open source

Absolutely.

They are not going to do this by asking them nicely. That is why it must become the law. Software developed for public money must be released under a recognised open source licence.

Re: Public Money, Public Code

#64

Post by phoronixrly »

figassis wrote: post #62

I'm wondering. If the govt pays you to build software, and you use include proprietary libraries in order to build a custom solution, so that the solution is owned by the government, should you open source everything incl. the proprietary components? I get the feeling that is what contractors are trying to avoid so they can keep their competitive advantages. That and hiding horrible code.

Bulgaria's laws on the matter require you to provide a shim so that the software can be built without the functionality provided by the proprietary closed-source dependency.

Re: Public Money, Public Code

#65

Post by HideousKojima »

pooper wrote: post #61
HideousKojima wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> 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 Why do they even need to have access to production secure credentials during development? Why not let them fall into the "pit of success" so local development never talks to a production server anywhere?

>Why do they even need to have access to production secure credentials during development? Why not let them fall into the "pit of success" so local development never talks to a production server anywhere?

Because most local governments are 10 to 20 years behind on anything remotely approaching best practices. It wasn't my choice to run things that way.

Re: Public Money, Public Code

#66

Post by b20000 »

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 your software, and your competitors can run off with your 500K investment! the grant money offsets the insanely high taxes and should be no strings attached to stimulate entrepreneurship.

Re: Public Money, Public Code

#67

Post by Forgeties79 »

b20000 wrote: post #66

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…

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 there they can use due to this law.

Ultimately it boils down to the language of the law and the I social scenario.

Re: Public Money, Public Code

#68

Post by krisoft »

_trackno5 wrote: post #54

Question for HN: How could this possibly work with software developed for the military?

Freedom of information laws frequently have national security interest exceptions. A similar carve out can be made from the requirement of open sourcing public funded software.

Re: Public Money, Public Code

#69

Post by SparkyMcUnicorn »

layer8 wrote: post #51

While I generally agree, publishing code commonly requires additional effort and diligence, such as checking the licensing situation of third-party code used, possibly anonymizing the devs involved, maintaining the public repository and credentials, dealing with all the communication from the public caused by publishing the code, and so on. Hence it also increases the cost for the taxpayers, and that needs to be fact…

> Hence it also increases the cost for the taxpayers

Isn't that just a short-term problem? Mid to long term, it should decrease costs dramatically.

Re: Public Money, Public Code

#70

Post by nickff »

OkayPhysicist wrote: post #58
nickff wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "However, that does not mean that all the drawings/plans/etc for the aircraft are made public." The (US) government actually tried the approach of purchasing a few initial runs and the plans for some missiles, but the results were bad. Initial development costs were high, reliability was low, and manufacturability was poor.

Having private companies control the intellectual property of our defense systems is a disaster that leads to aggressive rent seeking by defense contractors. Now, missile guidance software may not want to be open source, but the navy engineers down at China Lake should definitely have unrestricted ability to read, modify, and reproduce anything developed in their behalf.

I have long thought that missile and aircraft avionics should be made into more of a standardized, modular system (possibly open or government distributed source), for better upgradability and maintainability. I am sure this has been considered, and wonder why it hasn't been done.
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