There going to face a whole bunch of compatibility issues when dealing with other countries imho. However, i personally find this to be a good thing. Its at the very least a strike at the heart of big systems controlling the masses.
The fact the code is open sourced is much less significant than the fact now the Swiss government will need to negotiate complete ownership of any software they commission.
That’s going to make things more expensive for them, and limit the vendors prepared to work with them.
At least for ASTRA, for software developed in their projects that’s already the case. Frameworks etc. used are not covered, but all source code for PLC and SCADA are theirs and you’re required to hand over all code as part of documentation at the end. As a zip on a USB key, never to be looked at again.
No, that is counter intuitive. It may appear more expensive at first, but on the long run it is a lot more cheaper. It avoid vendor lock-in, recurring increase of dev costs and licensing and lots of other plagues of closed proprietary development like blackbox development and justification of hidden complexity as a driving factor on costs. I worked with legacy closed proprietary sw development and lock-in combined with legacy complexity made man-hour costs exorbitant. These are partially solved by open-sourcing, as kicking out a team and putting a new one is easier, but most importantly transparency as a driving factor on quality of development.
I imagine that the company would have the burden of proof that any of these criteria are fulfilled.
Third-party rights most likely refers to the use of third-party libraries, where the source code for those isn’t open source, and therefore can’t be disclosed, since they aren’t part of the government contract. Security concerns are probably things along the line of “Making this code open source would disclose classified information about our military capabilities” and such.
Switzerland are very good bureaucracy and I trust that they know how to make policies that actually stick.
Ah, i see… The „Security“ is used for the digital ID that is coming. Sadly, the part about Security of the ID is closed source to be “secure”. Someone has to teach them that security through # obscurity is no security…
This is not what the law is about. They can use closed sourced software just fine.
This is a law about software developed for the Schweiz government. If they needed a new CRM system or database system for medical records, it would be open source.
And they can use Outlook to inform everyone about it without problem.
I still think a good chunk of the code will be visible. You can have all the code up to the point where you call the proprietary function. Obviously you won’t get to see what’s inside that function but you can guess. Also, a lot of proprietary libraries have that functionality really well documented.
Open source will always be the best option, especially with a government supporting it! Imagine what government funding could do to accelerate improvements to Linux
Yep, the swiss government. Complicated is probably the best word to describe it. We are a very decentralized country (which makes sense for a country that was founded as a coalition to fight the royals that oppressed its people, none of those partners want someone to rule them) so every canton (state) does a lot of things differently than the other ones. But it is nice to see that after years of neglect they try to actually push digitalization by establishing common standards and systems.
I wonder how this will impact us infrastructure types. I am sure there must have been an exception to the rule at least once in my career but I can’t recall any, code I have made for all governments has been open source and if you lost it somehow I would just email it.
My only concern would be the systems that my code runs on top of won’t be willing to share. It is one thing to demand it from me, another to demand it from Siemens. Then you add in very low level code for individual devices such as VFDs
I guess the nightmare would be that PLC/DCS/VFD makers would basically be blacklisted and I would have to work around that fact.
My only concern would be the systems that my code runs on top of won’t be willing to share. It is one thing to demand it from me, another to demand it from Siemens. Then you add in very low level code for individual devices such as VFDs
Been contracting for the Swiss government for years, namely ASTRA. They have 0 concept of how that should happen. It’s their IP, but they don’t want to take it, host it, maintain it, or do anything else with it once the project is done.
Do they just expect others to foot the bill? Sure, free GitHub exists, but everything else? Open sourcing without maintenance is abandonware and usually useless.
In contrast, abandoned open source software can be picked up and updated by whomever gets paid to, where abandoned closed source software needs to be reimplemented from scratch at great expense to the tax payer.
Not only that, open source software can be adopted by the community (who already paid for the development through their taxes) for their own purposes. Consider for example the productivity impact on business that starts using tools that it cannot afford to develop itself.
Office things like document management, workflow management, accounting, but also tools used in the science community, transport and logistics, anything that government does is represented in some other way in society.
This is a big deal and I hope that it will reverberate across the globe and become the new normal.
Whilst we’re at it, consider the impact of open data, where government datasets are available to the community.
Whilst we’re at it, consider the impact of open data, where government datasets are available to the community.
That sounds like it would be pretty useful to get better quality statistical research papers (well, I guess quality would depend more upon the researcher), doable by people without corporate backing.
Though this it takes work for the different government departments to maintain. The team at data.govt.nz work with the different government departments to try to identify suitable data sources and get them into an update cycle, but there’s definitely not all data that can be released on there.
AFAIK, it was triggered by doing an annual event called GovHack where people were encouraged to create “hacks” with government data. It included software developers like me, data mentors from many different government departments, people with an interest and several departments with questions.
A decade ago I participated in three and won several awards but was disappointed with the government response to all our collective efforts and stopped participating.
Specifically “not invented here” was prevalent as a response to projects that represented hundreds of man-hours of effort.
It was demoralising to say the least.
I’m not sure what the missing ingredient was, but two of our projects were directly related to government effort in relation to public transport and public housing. Neither went anywhere despite face to face presentations to senior stakeholders in the relevant departments.
The third was a search engine with a completely different approach to that in use by the popular engines.
Using the idea of six degrees of separation to get to any person on the planet, I came up with the idea to use a word cloud that would represent the top N words in all documents.
When you click on a word, (say “alpha”) the resulting word cloud would represent the top N words for all the documents with “alpha” in it.
As you click, bravo -> charlie, etc. the list of documents gets smaller and smaller, until just your required document remains.
This has several advantages, you don’t need to distinguish between words and numbers or need to “understand” the meaning of a word or interpret the user intent.
More importantly, the user doesn’t need to know the relevant words or vocabulary, since they’re all represented in the UI.
Enhancements include allowing for negative words, as-in, exclude documents with this word.
Ah that sounds really interesting! Does it scale OK? I guess you could index at a word level and filter quite quickly for quick searches, but it seems you’re going to have to store the full text of every website?
I guess one of the things the Google originally solved was that the internet if full of crap and not all sites should have equal weighing. With AI spam sites these days, you’d probably also need a method of weighting results?
We never got that far to test that kind of issue and while I’ve been reimplementing it locally to search through employment advertising, I’m not at a point where I’d be able to test such a thing.
The original implementation used a data store written by another team member and it made the original project much too complicated.
Today I’d likely use duckdb to implement it. My local version uses text files for a proof of concept implementation.
I’ll gladly upload my stuff into some repo they allow me to. I’ve inquired about it in the past - I wrote a piece of sw that fills a requirement hole left by a widely used SCADA tool - but they outright forbid it. That was about a year ago.
My point is less about open source and more about how they have no clue how to handle their IP even now. It’s a nice gesture at best (at least currently. Maybe there’s more on the way).
If it’s the company who is contracted by the government, it seems obvious (to me) that the requirements to make it open source provides the push to make it public.
If it’s the government, then I don’t understand your point.
Step 2: governments, required by law, to fund FOSS projects in their tech stacks. Helped by organizations which trace project funding and lobbying to promote FOSS security by providing funding; a huge incentive to not insert malware
Step 3: coders are afforded dignity (UBI); given funds geared towards affording a maintenance team. Regardless of country of origin. Vital infrastructure is vital infrastructure. Talent is talent.
I support this move to Step 1
Where is the list of pauper gov’ts which force talent to get a job rather than be a talent and then maintain their projects with dignity!
Those jobs are mostly nonsense. Geared towards wasting our time building:
Separated over the PCIe bus with an IOMMU between it and system memory, as well as hardware switches to disable it if I’m not reachable
I haven’t found a way to remove it entirely. It’s the only option I’ve found so far, but if you know of a better designed option, I’m certainly interested
If the people are paying for it through taxes, it shouldn’t be contracted out to some company who lock further development behind their continued involvement.
Nothing “recent” about Microsoft hacks, it’s been happening for decades, the only difference is that the victim was you, now for a change, we have been made aware that Microsoft itself was hacked, but only because it impacted people outside Microsoft.
Microsoft was forced to reveal that it was hacked back in November 2023, and still hasn’t managed to prove that their systems are not still compromised today in July 2024. Just so we’re clear, their internal network was breached.
We also don’t know if it started in November, or if that’s just a convenient date because nobody externally has yet discovered evidence to show any different.
If the Lemmy repository was hacked and malicious code was added, people here would lose their shit. That’s what hit Microsoft and the fact that it’s only talked about in ICT professional circles is a good indication of just how bad this really is.
So, yeah, open source, open data, open governance, all of it.
I guess it’s not convenient to have Microsoft and Apple scan your company images and employee emails. Even take screenshots automatically if they can get away with it.
Appearently other countries are fine with this, which surprises me much more.
I guess the corpo version of windows have these sort of things turned off? But ms can turn them on whenever they want.