Public money, public code!
Technology
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
IMO this should be the case for everything developed using public money, looking at you, pharmaceutical companies...
But it will be written in Schwiizerdütch, so no one outside of Switzerland will understand it. I think it's a dialect of Perl.
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.
All governments should take notice
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.
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).
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:
-
yet another stupid web site
-
yet another stupid smartphone app
-
yet another stupid cloud base server instance
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.
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
"unless precluded by third-party rights or security concerns", so this bill does nothing
-
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.
It does one thing: make every contract have a clause specifically to combat this...
I work for a company which creates software for the government. Super exited for more OSS projects.
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.
Awesome!
That's a very surprisingly amazing thing of them!
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.
Now there is some common sense.
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."
the right side
bites lip, damn Switzerland…. that is hot as fuck
That's fucking amazing
Is their Microsoft deal about to expire?
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.