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European Commission issues call for evidence on open source

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Re: European Commission issues call for evidence on open source

#91

Post by tomaytotomato »

embedding-shape wrote: post #80
tomaytotomato wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With my original flippant comment I was trying to highlight that despite the many Opensource projects and the many awesome people who contribute to them, they should stay at arms length from EU and its legislators. When legislators start getting involved they will want to inevitably have their "own" version of something and their own SLAs and contracts. The reason they went with Microsoft/IBM/Oracle and others back i…

> despite the many Opensource projects and the many awesome people who contribute to them, they should stay at arms length from EU and its legislators. But despite that, they exist today, successfully so, and continue being funded by the very people you claim they should stay away from. I'm not sure if you looked into how this whole "funding FOSS" thing works like, but governments are not opening a fund, letting any…

The funding mechanism isn't really the point, its the product that comes after.

Sure, the EU contracts developers to build features they want, but when those requirements start coming from regulatory mandates rather than user needs, you're not just adding features to Ubuntu anymore.

You're forking it into something fundamentally different.

"EUbuntu"? :)

Look at how the EU handles tech regulations:

- GDPR a good thing on paper; with some terrible side effects - cookie banners, data bureacracy, walled gardens between US-EU websites.

- AI legislation; lets wait and see

- Digital sovereignty; fundamentally trying to gain access control for EU citizens data from Google and Apple.

Anyways, let's see what happens. Maybe I'm being too cynical and they'll just become savvy end-users of existing distros. But given the pattern, I'm not holding my breath.

Re: European Commission issues call for evidence on open source

#92

Post by zurfer »

kittikitti wrote: post #78

From my experience, people against open source often have buyers remorse. They often paid egregious sums of money for proprietary software that, to be fair, works well and includes enterprise support. When the same someone encounters the same solution but free and open source, they start rationalizing. The difference is mainly marketing, where open source projects have little to no marketing budget and are largely de…

"Nobody" is against open source.

People are against bad products, high maintenance, high complexity... .. or against working for free without much reward.

It would be great if there was a way for humanity to have and develop free open source software but it's not obvious how to do it well.

Re: European Commission issues call for evidence on open source

#93

Post by seydor »

jagged-chisel wrote: post #90
flowerthoughts wrote: post #27

I agree with others here that focusing your eyes on _using_ open source is, at least, an incomplete view of the problem. What we (European software engineers) have been arguing, is that software that is funded by public means, such as from universities or institutions, ought to be made fully public, including ability to tweak. Thinking that open source software will help solve your budget and/or political problem is…

> … public good to be freely used, modified, and redistributed That doesn’t mean “free as in beer,” but “free as in speech.” I do understand the potential for misinterpretation, but one could easily add “after paying for it” and those freedoms don’t change.

[flagged]

Re: European Commission issues call for evidence on open source

#94

Post by rendx »

Havoc wrote: post #30

Hopefully they can throw a couple of bucks at the foss things underpinning the internet.

They do, and have been for a while now.

https://www.ngi.eu/ngi-projects/

https://nlnet.nl/project/ currently listing 1566 foss projects that have received financial support

Re: European Commission issues call for evidence on open source

#95

Post by localuser13 »

Roark66 wrote: post #39
fsflover wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> software that is funded by public means, such as from universities or institutions, ought to be made fully public, including ability to tweak Anyone who agrees with this should sign this petition made by Free Software Foundation Europe: https://publiccode.eu

While I agree with the sentiment I'm not sure this is actually viable. For example here in Poland the previous govt invested in huge amount of software for digital govt services. From company formation, social insurance/heathcare (things like electronic prescriptions and patient data) to tax submission at all levels. All of this is implemented using publicly documented open standards so anyone can write a client for…

>None of the code is open source

Well, not all, for example mObywatel was recently open-sourced (in a ridiculous way, but still).

I think you raise some important points. In my opinion, a lot of code funded by public money should be open-sourced, but it's not as clear-cut as some people believe. I'll use this comment to point out some of fallacies that people responding to you make:

>Also open source government code means other governments can fork it, overall lowering implementation costs, while still keeping code sovereignty.

This is completely unrelated. French government won't deploy a Polish public health management website just because they found it on Github. For projects of such magnitude you need deep mutual cooperation between both governments, and a lot of changes. Making the code open-source is the least important part, the code can be just shared privately.

In fact, there are many such European code, data and information sharing initiatives. There are meetings and conferences where countries can discuss this on a technical level. The code is shared, just not via public channels.

>The government - and taxpayers - should care that having closed-source software means they are tied to the company that wrote it forever, so changes and bugfixes will be much more expensive.

If a private company owns code used by government for critical purposes and can take the government hostage it's outrageous and taxpayers should riot. This probably happens[1], but most code is either written by government itself, or at least government owns the code and can switch contractors if necessary.

In particular, AFAIR the government code we're discussing right now was written by COI (~central informatics department), which is a public institution.

[1] For example, governments use Azure and GCP, even though - to me - it's clearly shortsighted. Fortunately there was a wake-up call recently, and it changes slowly.

Re: European Commission issues call for evidence on open source

#96

Post by mort96 »

seydor wrote: post #93
jagged-chisel wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> … public good to be freely used, modified, and redistributed That doesn’t mean “free as in beer,” but “free as in speech.” I do understand the potential for misinterpretation, but one could easily add “after paying for it” and those freedoms don’t change.

[flagged]

Neither beer nor speech were the topics of discussion. "Free as in speech rather than free as in beer" is an analogy commonly used to specify that you're talking about freedom rather than money.

Re: European Commission issues call for evidence on open source

#97

Post by menaerus »

embedding-shape wrote: post #81
menaerus wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you honestly believe that all of these funding programs are beyond the point of "decency"? If we leave aside all of the bureaucratic bs, political connections and corruption when it comes to obtaining these funds (for the most cases), how do you attract experts in the field with 50k EUR grants?

> Do you honestly believe that all of these funding programs are beyond the point of "decency"? Yes, they currently fund people working full-time on contributing to FOSOS. If that's no "beyond decency", I don't know what is. Are you expecting these people to end up flush with cash, or what's the issue? > how do you attract experts in the field with 50k EUR grants? Because most of us experts actually care about what w…

> Are you expecting these people to end up flush with cash, or what's the issue?

No, you cannot build a serious product to compete with globally established products only by using the 50k EUR grant since serious products of larger scale (impact) necessitates more than a single expert.

How do you build an alternative cloud or alternative database or alternative AI model with a 50k grant? Or how do you attract 10, 15 maybe 20 people to work on it? How much money do you consider would be enough for these people to be "financially safe".

> Because most of us experts actually care about what we work with, not how much we get paid.

Most? I believe not. Most experts in the field are working for a beyond average salary and not for the FOSS projects. You need a leverage to attract those people to leave their jobs to contribute to something bigger (in terms of society) and yet this leverage is, as you say, "experts care about what we work with, not how much we get paid". This is laughable and at the same time worrying because you're genuinely convinced that this is an attitude everyone should follow. Such an ignorant view, sorry.

Re: European Commission issues call for evidence on open source

#98

Post by embedding-shape »

tomaytotomato wrote: post #91
embedding-shape wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> despite the many Opensource projects and the many awesome people who contribute to them, they should stay at arms length from EU and its legislators. But despite that, they exist today, successfully so, and continue being funded by the very people you claim they should stay away from. I'm not sure if you looked into how this whole "funding FOSS" thing works like, but governments are not opening a fund, letting any…

The funding mechanism isn't really the point, its the product that comes after. Sure, the EU contracts developers to build features they want, but when those requirements start coming from regulatory mandates rather than user needs, you're not just adding features to Ubuntu anymore. You're forking it into something fundamentally different. "EUbuntu"? :) Look at how the EU handles tech regulations: - GDPR a good thing…

> - GDPR a good thing on paper; with some terrible side effects - cookie banners, data bureacracy, walled gardens between US-EU websites.

I was gonna reply to your comment in good faith, but I realize right here that you don't actually understand what you're talking about. Cookie banners have nothing to do with GDPR, at all, and thinking they're somehow connected, grossly misunderstands regulation in the EU. How am I supposed to take anything else you say about these topics with a straight face?

So with that said, I hope you have a continued nice day :)

Re: European Commission issues call for evidence on open source

#99

Post by embedding-shape »

menaerus wrote: post #97
embedding-shape wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you honestly believe that all of these funding programs are beyond the point of "decency"? Yes, they currently fund people working full-time on contributing to FOSOS. If that's no "beyond decency", I don't know what is. Are you expecting these people to end up flush with cash, or what's the issue? > how do you attract experts in the field with 50k EUR grants? Because most of us experts actually care about what w…

> Are you expecting these people to end up flush with cash, or what's the issue? No, you cannot build a serious product to compete with globally established products only by using the 50k EUR grant since serious products of larger scale (impact) necessitates more than a single expert. How do you build an alternative cloud or alternative database or alternative AI model with a 50k grant? Or how do you attract 10, 15 m…

> No, you cannot build a serious product to compete with globally established products only by using the 50k EUR grant

Who said you have to? Software is not a "winner takes all", you can solve a niche problem, get paid OK for it, and have a better standard of living than the average person in your country. This is widespread in Europe already, not sure why it's so foreign to so many.

I'm sorry, but that you and your peers seem to select professions and work positions solely based on monetary profits is what it is, but don't try to give the impression it's like that all over the world, because it isn't. It's probably more common than you think, but your environment might lead you to believe it isn't. For that, I feel pity for you.

Re: European Commission issues call for evidence on open source

#100

Post by PurpleRamen »

localuser13 wrote: post #95
Roark66 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree with the sentiment I'm not sure this is actually viable. For example here in Poland the previous govt invested in huge amount of software for digital govt services. From company formation, social insurance/heathcare (things like electronic prescriptions and patient data) to tax submission at all levels. All of this is implemented using publicly documented open standards so anyone can write a client for…

>None of the code is open source Well, not all, for example mObywatel was recently open-sourced (in a ridiculous way, but still). I think you raise some important points. In my opinion, a lot of code funded by public money should be open-sourced, but it's not as clear-cut as some people believe. I'll use this comment to point out some of fallacies that people responding to you make: >Also open source government code…

>> Also open source government code means other governments can fork it, overall lowering implementation costs, while still keeping code sovereignty. > This is completely unrelated.

This is an option which does sometimes happen. And there is motivation to make happen more often, at least for EU-wide services. And there is also the side that it's doesn't have to happen between countries, it could be also happen the local level, like between administration of cities in the same country. The main reasoning here is more about spreading awarness and building the mindset that sharing code on all levels and working together even on such internal tools, can be good and should be increased.

> French government won't deploy a Polish public health management website just because they found it on Github.

Some governments have also their own platforms, specifically for co-working on code accross administrations. They are usually not public for reasons.

> For projects of such magnitude you need deep mutual cooperation between both governments, and a lot of changes. Making the code open-source is the least important part, the code can be just shared privately.

You still have to put it under a licence when you are co-working, even when it's shared privatly. Open Source does not neccessaly mean that the source is automatically accessable to the whole world.

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