The issue becomes when things are developed with a mix of public and private money. I’m not saying we shouldn’t tackle the issue, only that it can’t be as simple as public money = public resource. If that were true, nearly all of us would be required to work for free, since we got the majority of our education through public funding.
Edit: It seems everyone ignored the generalization I was replying to. Yes, in terms of code it’s actually relatively easy to require that a publicity funded project be open source and leave it at that. The business can decide if they want to write everything from scratch to protect their IP or if they want to open up existing code as a part of fulfilling/winning the contact.
In terms of other partially government funded projects, like the pharmaceutical example given, it’s much more difficult to say how much of the process and result are thanks to public funding. That’s really the only point I was trying to make, that it can get very hard to draw the line. With code, it can be relatively easy.
You can still pay people to write public code, though. Just because you can use it for free doesn’t mean it always has to be written for free. In some cases, sure, it can make more sense to have it for free if it’s a fully non-profit volunteer-run project, but that is not the only way to write open-source software. Talented developers are still talented, open-source or not.
I don’t think anyone intends public funds to be quite that sticky; public education is itself a public good, and having once attended a public school really has nothing to do with developing a product 20 years down the road.
Also, writing open source code can support a viable business. Not every example has been successful, and some have been sold to hypercapitalist owners who wanted to extract more profit, others have failed to keep up, but Canonical is doing alright with it, Red Hat did for a long time, among others. Plenty of bigger tech companies also employ people to write open source software, despite it not being the company’s main business, React, PyTorch, TensorFlow, and so many other projects. Those engineers definitely aren’t working for free.
govts print infinite money. All of us are working for free. Their fiat is credits for the company store.
If you think funding projects is bad then the response is to support lobbying project owners to put in malware until FOSS is publically funded.
All we have to do is verbally support it. And cheerlead when it occurs. We don’t actually have to actively do it. It’s a threat which is done in politics all the time.
Your joke aside, which I thought was funny did remind me that as it happens, the Swiss do an amazing job in making things internationally accessible.
Take for example their spectrum management system that not only allows you to search for categories of users, handles kHz to MHz data entry, gives access to the legal provisions and then the legislation itself, does so in four languages.
Hopefully more governments will follow this. At the very least, the taxpayer should have the right for whatever software’s source code that it funds development.
This is the way it should be. Governments around the world have spent decades enriching big tech with public money, when they could have pooled their resources and built FOSS software that benefited everyone.
Same goes for science and everything else funded by tax payers.
Well, in the last few years there was that guy politicians labelled a criminal because he inspected a web page and disclosed multiple amateur vulnerabilities.
As someone who works with and knows several military contractors, I’ve never heard of the US taking ownership of any code written. In fact, most of what they’re paying for is for companies to extend software they’ve already written to better fit the governments use case, such that even if the government owned the new improvements, that code wouldn’t function without the base application that pre-dates a government contract.
It depends on the software and situation of course, but if you are paying a contractor to develop/write a solution for you aka “government built” then the contractor that writes the code owns 0 of that code. It’s as if it was written by Uncle Sam himself.
Now, if the government buys software (licenses), the companies will retain ownership of their code. So if Uncle Sam bought Service Now licenses, the US doesn’t “own” service now. If service now extended capability to support the govt, the US still doesn’t own the license or that code in most cases.
Sometimes the government will even pay for a company to extend its software and that company can then sell that feature elsewhere. The government doesn’t get any benefit beyond the capability they paid for–ie they don’t own that code. That can work to the governments benefit though, because it can be used as a price negotiation point. “we know you can sell this feature to 50 different agencies if you develop it for us, so we only want to pay 25% of what you priced it at”.
But like it said, if it’s a development contract and the contractors build an app for the government, all of the contracts I’ve ever seen, have Uncle Sam owning it all. The govt could open source it if they wanted and the contractor would have no say.
You’d think so, but the answer is no. They’ve employed companies like Microsoft, Oracle, etc. to write up the security handbooks that says proprietary software is more secure. Heck, even electronic voting systems in the US is closed-source.
Simply, you can’t. I’m personally all for an open source alternative for electronic voting. I can bank online, but not vote online. I’d trust an open source online voting platform more than I’d trust poll workers to not skew some votes. I’d also like to be able to track my vote and ensure it was cast for the person I voted for.
Banking is completely different from voting from a security point of view. None of the parties in a bank transaction are anonymous, and there are numerous ways to retry or roll back a transaction. Computerized voting is more like crypto currency. 😝
you can’t have secret ballot and have a secure, auditible online vote. One of the problems of social media is it has created enemy lists for authoritarian states.
You kind of can. Depends how fully auditable you want, but you can have cryptographically anonymized entries, that (I believe?) could even allow the original voter to track their vote, without enabling anyone else to track the vote back to the voter.
It’s a different project, but GNU Taler have some interesting work on anonymized but not forgeable money transactions.
The issue with online voting, no matter what you do, is that someone can force you under threat of violence to vote for a specific candidate, and watch to make sure you do it. Complete privacy in the voting booth is paramount to ensuring that everyone can vote freely.
Long version: I’m pretty sure; no. I believe that; tools used like apps would not be subject to FOIA.
I deal with public records requests at work… email, documents etc. sure thing, but I’m pretty sure that the AG would laugh at you requesting the source code for apps we use.
—- I could only wish that we were mandated to use only open source software
Specifically I was referencing the recent Russian cyberattack on US government servers that were/are run by microsoft. The flaw was known about for years but no one did anything about it because profit.
I’m curious if this also applies to military or intelligence software. I’m guessing at the very least software embedded in weapons systems is not included. If I understood the article correctly there were some exemptions for security reasons.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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