Switzerland mandates all software developed for the government be open sourced
Switzerland mandates software source code disclosure for public sector: A legal milestone
Public money, public code!
IMO this should be the case for everything developed using public money, looking at you, pharmaceutical companies…
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.
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.
If governments could print infinite money they would just pay themselves an infinite salary.
Your fundamentals of economics is broken.
They have paid and are paying themselves a never ending salary. The printing is gradual and then all at once.
We will reach infinity, make sure you get your hands on the infinity or trillion dollar note.
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.
Step 1: all software has to be open source
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:
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yet another stupid web site
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yet another stupid smartphone app
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yet another stupid cloud base server instance
Yup and then they move the spyware/malware/etc into a layer below where nobody knows what is inside…
How is your baseband modem in your smartphone doing, by the way?
this is why FOSS community goes ahead and removes untrustworthy blobs and replaces them with open source alternatives.
The open hardware is an issue, but there are efforts there as well.
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