Public money, public code!
this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2024
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IMO this should be the case for everything developed using public money, looking at you, pharmaceutical companies...
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But it will be written in Schwiizerdütch, so no one outside of Switzerland will understand it. I think it's a dialect of Perl.
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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.
Meanwhile my country's apps don't let you open them if you have Developer Options enabled on android :)
And they'll prob make it illegal for you to bypass and hide developer options because to them that means you're hacking them.
Country: it’s illegal to have software development skills 🤡
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.
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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.
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).
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All governments should take notice
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
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I work for a company which creates software for the government. Super exited for more OSS projects.
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"unless precluded by third-party rights or security concerns", so this bill does nothing
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I imagine that the company would have the burden of proof that any of these criteria are fulfilled.
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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.
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That's fucking amazing
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 makes me curious in the US on whether or not government app source code would be provided via a FOIA request.
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.
Security by obscurity the 100% least effective security measure! Wait what? MS left the government knowingly vulnerable for years for the shareholders?! That's some good security right there!
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Heck, even electronic voting systems in the US is closed-source.
How can elections even be trusted to be fair in that case?
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Generally, works of the US government are public domain.
However, most apps are produced on contract with development companies, and I expect the contract specifies that the rights remain with the developer.
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I think that's a good call.
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.
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.
This is specifically about software developer for the government. Microsoft office is then not included.
I hope more governments do this, especially after how unsurprisingly shit (read: insecure) microsoft has become.
Awesome!
Now there is some common sense.
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.
That's a very surprisingly amazing thing of them!
Wwwaiiiiiittt... So does this mean OS too? Is an entire country switching to the dark side? Linux, I mean Linux
"Windows wasn't developed for the Swiss government, it was developed for the general public and we adopted it off the shelf."
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Together monkey strong!!
Tangential, but there's a long list of government github accounts here: https://government.github.com/community/
bites lip, damn Switzerland…. that is hot as fuck
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