Public Money, Public Code
publiccode.eu
publiccode.eu
It seems crazy to me that taxpayers pay for this software but it doesn't belong to them.
Knowing what I do know I gotta wonder if it's just about those developers being ashamed how bad their software is and don't want others to see it.
I've worked in public sector and this is typical. the states can't open source it because they don't own it, they just pay a third-party to build+operate it for them. This is touted as "small govt", but it really just makes things less efficient. The total number of people involved stays the same.
So the states paid the bills so can license the result any way they want.
How can they pay for something and not own it?
Sounds to me like there are deep corruption problems
Public sector usually makes up the rules for itself and then upholds them in the software. Very little public sector software could be resold in the private sector without significant investment into making it more general, usually to the detriment of the product. The "multiple clients => lower price" thus holds no water, because it's always just different branches of government and the usual way it ends up is that after 10 years or so the product is still used in one place only and the original programmers long left the company. And public still pays for a yearly license.
They license it.
Renting everything seems to be the fad in business management, and governments often ape business.
I consider this to be a flavor of corruption, too, but it isn't, legally. It is the desired outcome for many, and for many more, maybe not the outcome they wanted, but the logical outcome of what they asked for.
There has been a decades-long process in the US of pressuring governments to do less, to outsource more, to privatize, to move to "public-private partnerships" or whatever new buzzword means socialize losses and privatize profits.
And this is what you get - government that doesn't have the capabilities it needs to do what people ask of it. Which makes it look bad, which encourages another cycle of privatization...
If you want functional government, stop electing people who promise to break it.
Corruption can be legal.
Like election/campaign financing in the USA
Have you ever purchases software? Any media, recorded performance, or book?
I don't mean to be rude here, but this question shows a complete lack of awareness of the problem space.
There are a number of contributing factors to why most government software is not open source, but here are some of my direct observations as a consultant to government departments, an employee of government departments, a purchaser of products and services at multiple corporations, and a manager of contract software development as an employee of a corporation, and the owner of small business.
1. Stakeholders building software, using either directly employed, or contracted resources, have a desire to develop the software for the lowest cost possible. Generally this means preferring buying over building for many cases, and building on commercial (paid, free, or open source) stacks that promise easier development and efficiency. This often results the project being encumbered by licenses that complicate the potential release of software as open source.
2. Many government initiated software development projects are done directly in pursuit of supporting legislation that is tightly bound to the jurisdiction of the legislation; even if the legislation is meant to ratify state/provincial, federal, international or other standards, laws, and regulations, there will be regional variations that require at minimum configuration, and most likely real code changes to meet requirements. This often results in software that is tightly coupled to a particular jurisdiction in terms of both legislation and regulations, but also in terms of the ecosystem the software is developed in. The encumbrances created by these couplings often have dependencies on closed and proprietary systems which is a great deal of friction for releasing open source projects.
3. Despite the passage of many international rules related to economic development agreements like the former NAFTA and the newer USMCA which provide provisions to allow fair competition for government contracts within the regions affected (and I believe EU and other trade blocs have similar legislation), the opportunity to award software development contracts to local firms (at any level of locality across municipal, state, and federal jurisdictions) is a strong temptation for politicians to curry favor with voters and business communities. This is often pitched as economic benefits by creating jobs locally, while bolstering local businesses and making them more competitive; if these projects are subsequently released as open source projects, the perception from decision makers is that the value of the investment in the local community is lost. This is where a significant opportunity for what you bill as corruption is identified - I haven't seen a procurement process in government that can't be subverted by suitably motivated buyers and sellers.
4. Releasing open source software can be a public relations nightmare - bug reports, public review and criticism of design or implementation choices generally land on the desks of whatever passes for a service desk for that jurisdiction, who are usually ill equipped to deal with these technical issues, and also are generally understaffed for their core responsibilities. Eventually those reports and criticisms make their way up through different paths and land on the desk of high level bureaucrats and elected officials, who then have to deal with these issues as public relations items. Have to deal with HeartBleed2022? If it's internally developed and open source, the buck stops with the politicians and how they let it happen, time for a public inquiry! If it's an off the shelf product, "We are disabling the service until a patch becomes available." [1, specifically log4j] , and people can grumble about purchasing choices, but it's much harder to criticize the actual implementation.
Alot of folks in government (including me when I was there) wanted to release our stuff as OSS, but there is only so far you can go with opensourcing modules that depend on SAP code, IBM code, or systems that are supplied by the federal government.
[1] https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/e-services/...
Specifically, I would say that number three is mostly false. The companies that receive those contracts are not, at least in my experience, small local shops (and there is an argument that they should be), but instead big consulting companies that know the correct people and procedures.
>>"Alot of folks in government (including me when I was there) wanted to release our stuff as OSS, but there is only so far you can go with opensourcing modules that depend on SAP code, IBM code, or systems that are supplied by the federal government"
The point of the endeavor is precisely to change that.
Define small local shops? I have worked on procurement processes in the United States at the municipal, state, and federal level, but my experience is largely based in the Canadian market. These are companies that have 100-1000 employees, working on technologies tightly scoped to specific municipal, state/provincial programs, and in some cases Federal programs. Some industries include prisons, agricultural programs, energy programs (hydro-electric, oil, gas, nuclear), and a broad cross section of infrastructure projects.
You can disagree or be unconvinced, but even a basic google search highlights the significant issues with procurement, and the fact that we have old and current laws on the books to address these concerns is evidence enough that procurement practices and influence from politicians and industry need regulation.
Simply put, procurement is about finding the right proposition for governments, and demonstrating to taxpayers that they are getting best value, while rewarding the individuals and industries that supported the elected officials and beaurocrats. This isn't a personal opinion, it's well supported by documentation in the industry.
> The point of the endeavor is precisely to change that.
I 100% agree, and I avidly support these kinds of initiatives; my comment didn't discount that, it was an explanation of why public code, developed internally, or by contractors, isn't necessarily suitable for open source release. Not all of the reasons are technical or legal, some are due to organizational or social pressure.
Cloud SAAS e.g. Salesforce apps
Actually, quite easily, and it's cheaper that way (especially if they pay to acquire it, and it wasn't exclusively developed for them.)
Which is also why they would do that.
Try buying a copy of Adobe Software[1], and then hosting the *.isos on your website. You paid for it, you should get to do it!
The short answer is, it costs more to buy 100% of the rights, and governments rarely do so.
[1] It'd have to be older Adobe Software, as modern Adobe Software is all monthly licenses, etc.
of course. But this idea assumes that the contractors are selling the same software to multiple agents. Is that really the case?
Or are the agents already charging the maximum they could for the software, and yet, retain the rights themselves in the hopes of whiteboxing this software in the future for some other gov't agency?
We are not talking about a single consumer. We are talking about the state itself. They will get the license they want if they believe it is needed.
They will also use more tax-payers money to do so. I agree that the code should be public, but I can see why that isn't the case.
From what I hear it has changed just a little bit, not much, though. It also depends on state and town.
Speaking for .de and North-Rhine-Westfalia from 1994 to 2001 here.
Small government doesn’t have anything to do with outsourcing functions. Small government is about not doing those things to begin with.
There is definitely a case to be made for a government, big or small, tracking a pandemic. I’m not arguing it shouldn’t. Outsourcing that function to a contractor, however, does not “shrink” the role of government.
The contracts go to software/it services companies that are connected at the state government level. WWT comes to mind.
> Govt doing the same things but having them done by contractors does not make it "smaller".
There's a crucial distinction between "privatization of govt" and "smaller govt" which usually gets lost in the public discourse.
Maybe I'm reading this wrong, but are you suggesting big government is more efficient than small government? If so I wonder if there are some good examples of that, because previously I wasn't aware anyone would ever argue that could be the case.
It increases it, because (even optimally) you need the same number of people doing the main work, and as supervisors, HR support, etc., for the main workers, plus you have additional contracting and contract management overhead on both sides.
But small vs big government isn't really about the number of employees but rather what the government does.
You could say these exact words about the vast majority of PPP (public-private partnerships).
A buddy of mine just won one that finally set the precedent that database schemas are not security:
So you’ll win, but won’t get want you want- a way to view, understand, improve, and share.
So basically you're right - you'll get an unbuildable clusterfuck.
It helps you with the process of FOIA requests, and if/when granted, hosts the responses online publicly.
Why do they even need to have access to production secure credentials during development? Why not let them fall into the "pit of success" so local development never talks to a production server anywhere?
Because most local governments are 10 to 20 years behind on anything remotely approaching best practices. It wasn't my choice to run things that way.
If I was a state employee and I wrote the app, and I had to release the source code, then I'm making it very easy for a bad actor to find a vulnerability and exploit it to leak the data of citizens.
One might respond: "Well software shouldn't have those holes! Just because it's closed source, doesn't mean that won't happen anyway
Also true, in an ideal world, the software should be free from such vulnerabilities.
However security by obscurity is a layer of defense... And there might be other controls in place too to help.. e.g. a git repo behind SSO...
If I accidentally check in a CSV of a data dump, or my access Keys, etc... It doesn't immediately become a data leak/issue.. I have at least some time to reconcile that.. but if the repo is publicly accessible, the moment it hits the wire someone can copy that data...
One might follow up: "Well, they should not make the code if they are not competent enough to write it and host it"
Would be nice as well! But sadly there is only so many developers that can do this kind of work with a very high level of security and competence... By requiring governments to make this code freely available, you could basically assume two outcomes: nothing the government has on you will be secret, including sealed records and private information. In addition, IT workers would be paid 7-figures with 5-10 years of experience, as every government project that touches software now needs 5+ highly trained workers to avoid gigantic lawsuits.. and no one could get an entry level job in government because one bad commit could cause an 8-figure lawsuit
And just to throw in a silly extrapolation... I would love an M109 Paladin tank... my tax dollars pay for them :-)
If they give you a tank they have one less tank to do stuff with but if they give you a copy of software they still have the ability to do stuff with the software.
There’s a whole bunch of software out there that has been open sourced by government agencies like nasa and you don’t see satellites falling out of the sky on a regular basis.
There are some components of rocketry that deserve careful consideration in sharing (i.e. rocket fuels) but a lot of those have mostly leaked at this point and the government has other reasons to limit their production and thus limits the supply of chemical components.
Much like with software there are going to be some secret components related to communication and the like - but those can be cherry picked from the information and deliberately hidden... similar to how most software teams don't check all their private SSH keys into public repos (usually).
I think government/ bureaucracy moves slowly and most people working within them don't come from a software background so a lot of the older norms of not sharing things (outside of things like data/documents) is just the way things are done. I expect to a lot of these people sharing a source code is treated exactly the same as sharing any other mechanical designs which they just often don't do.
Hopefully both things will change.
Elon had to go to Russia to get rocket plans. We have truly dropped the ball on this.
In your example it would be the layer of defense. But then we still have to wonder who is the attacker? The assumption made on the web page is that the developer is the attacker. The obscurity then becomes a major issue rather than the defense.
Yes, we will have to pay what it costs and we will have to add extra developers. We all know the difference?
I could write any government app or software but it would be a slow process, it would be hostile to further development and the security of it would be laughable. But from the GUI you wouldn't notice the difference. Mine might actually be nicer.
I hoped by saying "a layer of defense" indicated that there was more layers
If a government can't afford to release the sources in public right away, a gradual transition is possible: vendors that offer open source software have their prices multiplied by 0.1 during bidding. And this factor of preference for open source can be increased or decreased state-wide depending on the budget.
It's not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_through_obscurity#Cri....
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerckhoffs's_principle.
A layer, not the only layer.
> System security should not depend on the secrecy of the implementation or its components.
It is not depending on it. It is just an additional layer to delay or reduce impact.
> If I was a state employee and I wrote the app, and I had to release the source code, then I'm making it very easy for a bad actor to find a vulnerability and exploit it to leak the data of citizens.
Which doesn't seem to suggest any mitigation other than the lack of published source code.
Using log4jail as a recent example, I had a code base vulnerable to this attack, but it would not be expected that the application used a vulnerable version (we forked the popular code base), and it only was vulnerable in a specific way (which, to this day, no one has attempted to explot, as I have an alarm set up if that kind of input comes in in logs, and previously had the block at the WAF when we were vulnerable for the 4 hours it took to fix the issue.
Security by obscurity is not I good defense, it's a single layer, which buys you time. You need to have multiple layers of defense, and closed source might buy your team time to fix issues.. or make it viable to release the application while a third party takes a year on a security audit.
I mean if gov't creates a useful API (eg. weather), or creates some reusable useful module (eg. something like hibernate), that would be nice. But, just generally publishing everything? REALLY BAD IDEA.
I have spent a lot of time in public sector IT and I’ve rarely seen a management or information security team that didn't subscribe to this kind of security through obscurity thinking for internal code, including the management teams that were completely behind using open source code for cost, robustness, and avoiding vendor risk.
So that's why no governments run Linux servers, right? After all, the Linux kernel is open source.
And just to throw in a silly extrapolation... I would love an M109 Paladin tank... my tax dollars pay for them :-)
And just to throw in some silly pedantry, the M109 is a self-propelled howitzer, not a tank. :)
It was expensive (18 million Euros I believe, but may be wrong). But other than that, it was excellent from start to finish. First release a few weeks after the API was available. The source was divided into logical components of more or less perfect size, it was straightforward, well commented, responsive to PRs, worked, and had no security issues as far as I remember.
The mentality is changing in govtech and there are lots of orgs really trying to push for better software practices. It can be a slog though.
I have, for example, built things for government in the past. They paid for some code that I wrote and now they can use it as they like. But, (as with any client), they don’t have the right to turn around and give it to you.
If you want that code, I’m happy to sell it to you. But, again, you’re not allowed to sell it on or give it away.
Because that’s how software consulting works.
I can’t imagine that the government (or anybody really) would do that.
https://github.com/admin-ch/CovidCertificate-App-Android
There is even a section "Reproducible builds"
1) there are people who understand f/oss. Sometimes they are in power and choose it for the projects they oversee. This is small, but growing slowly. 2) there are people who don’t understand and the default is to do what their contractor says. This is huge and probably stable. 3) there are people who understand and don’t like it because of the lack of formal support and the chaos and perceived unpredictability. This is the “buy Microsoft/IBM and they will support you” group. This is large but shrinking a little. 4) there are contractors who don’t want the risk to their contracts being renewed from competitors seeing their code and being able to support. Obviously no feds in this group, but lots of feds are influenced by their contractor and take on their position. This irks me the most because its acting in the contractors benefit to the government’s detriment. I don’t understand how people in oversight positions take this position in good faith. 5) there are contractors who have IP and want to resell or reconfigure for multiple clients and would raise their bid price if they had to release under f/oss. Again, not feds, but this is a perceived fear of people with set budgets who want to get best value and their incumbent contractors are saying it’s more expensive if they have to do f/oss.
I’m probably missing some of the tech workers. But I think the biggest blocker is contractors as probably 95% of actual hands on work is done by contractors. Some perpetual who have been in place for decades. Even when the companies change, the individuals stay the same.
These are the real vested interests preventing this code becoming open source and why lots of government agencies who do their own development are perfectly happy to release the code or access to their APIs.
Absolutely.
They are not going to do this by asking them nicely. That is why it must become the law. Software developed for public money must be released under a recognised open source licence.
Why is software treated as something to be outsourced to a private sector company? Why can't we have "civil programmers" who contribute to an ever growing body of public code just as the legislative process contributes to an ever growing body of laws. This body of civil programmers (terrible name but hey) could also work hand in hand with the open source community, letting stakeholders (citizens) contribute too.
I think this brings the open source developers income issue to the table which is getting better but at its own pace.
Governments often don't even employ the armies of civil servants anymore, lots and lots of stuff is contracted out.
The way around this might be to convince some of the smaller "tech wannabe" states to enact something, and let it grow from there.
Unlike the majority of infrastructure in the world, software literally isn't set in stone. This makes it much more powerful in some senses, but also much more fragile.
Look at Hoover Dam - a project designed to last a hundred years with a pretty singular purpose. The operation and maintenance burden is clear, and basically unchanging throughout the lifetime of the dam.
I agree with you in general here, but I think the actual work involved with your proposal is more akin to what the IT departments at agencies like the IRS or DMV are already doing. Specing systems for internal processes, and managing dataflow from old systems to new ones.
At least in America, one political party is devoted to outsourcing everything to the private sector, including prisons!
In the UK, at least one political party is trying to privatize and outsource everything. The succeeded with all the commuter rail in the 80s and now they want to do the same to the NHS.
Long story short, there is a lot of money to be made.
Thanks, I needed a laugh.
Don't worry, many governments effectively outsource legislation to commercial lobbying bodies who feed draft and proposals to parliamentarians.
Prominent example: The American Legislative Exchange Council, which even formalizes this practice.
Why can't we have "civil programmers" who contribute to an ever growing body of public code just as the legislative process contributes to an ever growing body of laws. This body of civil programmers (terrible name but hey) could also work hand in hand with the open source community, letting stakeholders (citizens) contribute too.
"Posts that look like spam according to our Community Guidelines are blocked on Facebook and can't be edited."
https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs https://github.com/nationalsecurityagency https://github.com/GSA https://github.com/CMSgov https://github.com/CDCgov
I wonder if there's a directory of government Github orgs somewhere?
And GSA keeps a list, sort of, of all the US gov projects at code.gsa.gov. But the code activity got defunded a year or two ago and no longer updates a consolidated catalog and now just points to all the various departments.
Someone else has @CDC as they got there first. They aren’t active so CDC tried to get in touch with them and GitHub doesn’t provide a way to contact people. That’s kind of nice actually, they respect privacy.
GitHub did offer to contact the user without sharing the users contact info. They asked if @CDC was active and if not, would they mind letting CDC.gov use it. The user responded that they are active, just not with public activity. And that they would like to keep it.
I thought the whole process was pretty nice. Github respected the user, and still tried to help. User considered and didn’t change their existing account.
Some people got upset and tried to formulate plans to “make” the user give it up, but those weren’t pursued because it would be wrong and a waste of efforts and, I think, harmful to the purpose for collaborative software.
So that’s how CDCgov exists. And I suspect there’s a similar story behind CMSgov and all the other sites where staff were too slow to set stuff up.
Hence it also increases the cost for the taxpayers, and that needs to be factored into the cost estimates of software projects. It’s not like they can just dump their git repository into alt.binaries.
Isn't that just a short-term problem? Mid to long term, it should decrease costs dramatically.
It WOULD likely require massive retooling as much "government code" is more like "black box machine that does X" than "fancy new web-app".
I feel like there's too many benefits to even list. Having seen some of the proprietary code developed for 3 letter agencies, it's shocking how bad some of it is (and there's even projects that have better open source alternatives that solve every use-case) and adding transparency can only be a good thing... in my opinion.
However, if the software is open source, or alternatively owned by the government, than they can ask for competitive bids for maintenance. The vendor can no longer ask huge sums for basic maintenance. The projected savings can even justify significantly higher costs at the development stage.
- 18F https://github.com/18f
- GDS https://github.com/alphagov
- CDS https://github.com/cds-snc
I do agree with the sentiment, it's absurd that any software developed through public means is not available to the public.
In Washington State they started with BioTrackTHC; couldn't share the code cause it's a proprietary and a security risk; however they were dumping parts of the database as CSVs so folk could check that (and confirm some bugs!). Then WA switched to LeafData (MJ Freeway) and wouldn't share that code either; continued to share similar data-dumps. Now WA has moved to just uploading CSVs to the State system in code they wrote themselves -- and still won't share the code (and now are doing even less to share the data).
It's frustrating when viable open source solutions exist and are actively ignored by the State agencies (we were blocked from even participating in workgroups about the future of T&T (which don't really matter, they didn't even follow the recommendations of their own workgroups))
I appreciate NOAA's api.weather.gov, rucsoundings.noaa.gov, and other free public APIs.
Also good to see the FAA dipping their toes in free public APIs (api.faa.gov).
Our use cases with these solutions are kind of essential, so there are no possibilties to "give back".
Any federal agency is supposed to cover one aspect of the government services. Developing individual software, which cover national laws.
Also note that our software is almost 90% legacy code. And new solutions need to work around these quirks.
Formerly it was accessible only to other public administrations. That provision didn't generate any meaningful outcomes as it was not avalable to other developers, just to public administrations in-house developers. With the last reform of the CAD in 2016, it was open to everyone and development of digital public services accelerated.
It was very frustrating because the citizen review board accepted the appraiser’s number even though they couldn’t describe the methods and even though I brought dozens of comps showing a lower price and valuation of actual sales. They fixated on the number that the software produced.
I think if software should be used like this it needs to be auditable and at least source available, if not foss.
Also, if there was a bunch of public code available because of grant funding, that means - in theory - many people might not have to invest their own money (or quite as much) because there is more out there they can use due to this law.
Ultimately it boils down to the language of the law and the I social scenario.
and if I as an entrepreneur put money into something, I expect to own it. even if a grant was involved. after all, I already paid taxes to make those grants possible in the first place.
I'm curious to see the nitty gritty here myself.
It's more like if the tax office build a software to compute taxes, you can use it to compute your taxes, add a simplified a gui for basic users or incorporate it in your ERP.
Expecting software to be open source is nice when there is an army of 10s of thousands of FAANG employees to constantly keep it up to date, but less so when there's limited people. Sure, it hypothetically could be kept up to date by the generous and capable people of the city after the fact, but that's farfetched. It isn't realistic or practical for a budget-conscious software company to open them selves up to scrutiny, participate in the open source community, accept bug fixes, do code reviews from strangers, etc. It's more expensive to do OSS, not less.
(As an example, the Linux Kernel is mainly made by large companies with lots of expensive employees. Pick your 10 favorite GitHub project with more than 10k stars and see who the primary contributors are.)
You still pay the company to develop and maintain the software. Same way as open source developers get "sponsored". The reason is that anyone who wants to see the code and suggest on how to make it better, or to report a bug, then that would be possible. Furthermore, that work can be reused by other parts of the government.
That last point is why some companies wouldn't want to do it, or would charge more. However, to your point, I think the increased cost is worth it in this case.
Sure, there are going to be less better roads/schools by 500k, but the problem with that money is that there are rarely big projects for that amount, so it's not like they would be put to best use without being "lost" in the process of relocation.
> Expecting software to be open source is nice when there is an army of 10s of thousands of FAANG employees to constantly keep it up to date, but less so when there's limited people.
And being closed source makes keeping software up to date easier?
The website is asking for "legislation requiring that publicly financed software developed for the public sector be made publicly available under a Free and Open Source Software licence." So in response to your example of a company bidding lower for closed-source rights, you would just deny the illegal request. Same as if a company offering to construct a bridge was undercutting other contractors on the condition they be allowed to ignore certain expensive safety requirements.
if those other pressing needs are so pressing why aren't they looked into already, and is only mentioned when a tender offer is on the table?
The gov't ought to consider each individual need individually and budget it individually.
As for the company B offering 8.5m for keeping the source code private, i would argue that they are getting a better deal out of the gov't than the gov't is receiving.
Imagine if the company B can resell the software for money to another govt. This means the initial gov't paid for the research and development of the software, but the company B is reaping the benefits - all for paying a measly $500k. If the software can sell for more than $500k to the 2nd customer, they'd have made pure profit.
Therefore, the gov't who initially paid to do the R&D should actually own an equity stake in the software if it is to remain private. After all, the taxpayer funded the risk of R&D, and should partake the benefits of that risk.
Hugging Face transformers has >60k stars and fewer than 30 employed maintainers, many sharing other responsibilities. Arguably, part its success comes external model contributions from FAANG companies (among others), but the key ingredient was the creation of an open platform.
Disclaimer: I work there
Imagine a contract for a road that requires maintenance and the 9.5M bidder offers to lower by a million if they don’t provide maintenance.
Anyone remember the name of the book/folder and the publisher?
Maybe time to have an equivalent of SciHub for code as well, although it will probably be harder to source that.
Zenodo: https://about.zenodo.org/ OSF: https://osf.io/
Off-course the reality of a complete and reasonable functional software stack is actually made of several technical contexts and drawing the complexity lines at the right sweet spots is hard: mistakes will be made, due to the permanent/long-term toxic brain-washing/lobbying of big tech, and they will be "not free" to fix.
Big tech wants to make you hard dependent on all their software and servers to create a permanent flow of money, which is much harder/impossible to do with centralized-server-less or local and independant software.
Boiling frog strategy: for that, they have huge funding (blackrock/vanguard/etc) in order to make their companies (microsoft/google/etc) super cheap/free for a very long time and to suffocate competition over time which has less cash flow (those funds have thousands of billions of $). They will create server centralized services, with crippled user-side open source software (not really usable without their servers). They call that "software as a service".
That said, some of them will manage to keep their "services" free selling user data to brokers and selling ads.
The control of user-side software is via open source grotesque and absurde complexity and size: google(blink(~webkit)/geeko) and apple(webkit) based browsers with their compilers. They know only their army of devs can maintain it, and they have enough control to do planned obsolescence there as a bonus.
Well, this is not very well explained, but I think it is enough to get the idea.
Here the author seems to be talking about software that was originally written by the government. Or, one supposes, where development is chiefly funded by the government.
- Selling to public sector is a costly and lengthy process. Not to mention the lack of competence from the public sector partners.
- Usually, the money is made by making sure the entity will subscribe for as long as possible, and it should be possible to repackage the same software and sell to somebody else with little effort.
- Open sourcing puts the company into a position where it's own code could be reused by the competitor without investing as much.
- Furthermore, the projects are usually short lived due to the nature of procurement, budgeting and changing regulations.
- It is a risky business that requires complicated solutions to complicated problems, not much of it is reusable outside of the specific domain.
I was developing such software for years. Better ask yourself why huge IT departments are doing barely anything despite their funding.
But what license should this Public Code be? GPL like? AGPL? or Apache 2.0 and BSD like?
The ERP we use for HR/Payroll, Accounts Payable/Receivable, Utility Billing, etc. costs an exorbitant amount of money each year, and the quality of both the software and the technical support we receive is comical. And this is new deployment, too. We upgraded from an IBM AS/400-based system a couple of years ago which I honestly long to go back to now and again out of frustration.
Let me give you just one an example of how we are held hostage to a private software vendor - collecting payment for utility bills. We are forced to use one credit card processor because it's the only "partner" that the ERP vendor has for payment processing. I guarantee you that you've never heard of them before. Their software is abysmal, and last time I checked, the ERP vendor gets a flat rate for each payment they collect (in addition to the standard credit card processing % + flat fee that goes to the merchant services company). There's no alternative. It's a Windows Service that has a tendency to crash several times a day without logging anything to Event Viewer. It's known to charge a credit card, but not return a success code to back the ERP, meaning the money was collected but their bill doesn't show as being paid. It's a problem I've documented clearly and created tickets on for over seven months at this point, and it's still not been resolved. Why? They have zero motivation. It's a beast to migrate to a new ERP (multiple years and $1M+), and they treat us as if we have no leverage in pushing for prompter support or better quality software. So luckily we are still on-premise with full access to the SQL database. I have written procedures to update the payment status manually each time this happens, post the transaction to the ERP, update reference numbers, and do a few other various things that should happen automatically when it works correctly. We were scolded for digging around ourselves and doing this, but if we open a support case, it takes 2-14 days to get a response back and that's simply not feasible when these payments need to post before EOB.
There's also no open API available. We have the in-house expertise to develop integrations and try to tie systems together in ways that make sense for our environment. Nope. Whatever few integrations that exists costs tens of thousands of dollars up-front, have very lackluster support, are infrequently updated, and are very rigid in their capabilities. I've asked how we can gain access to a sandbox environment or get documentation on an API so we can test and create the integrations that these sacred "partners" are able to -- radio silence. I've even reached out to individuals who work at the company on LinkedIn asking a similar question of how an independent developer can integrate with their ERP ecosystem -- left on read, no response.
Need a customization or change? Let's schedule a series of meetings and get it quoted out. $5,000 and two months later, we now have one new line of text displayed on our water bills about the drought. This is the level of control they maintain and use to line their pockets at our expense.
And now I've noticed that over the past year or so, there's been a very aggressive push to move to a SaaS environment. Meaning we'd lose direct access to SQL, lose access to logs and other tools I use to debug/diagnose, and be reliant on (read: held hostage by) the vendor even more. Good luck getting access to any of our raw data at that point. It's vendor lock-in to an extreme.
We (the agency, but more so the tax payers by extension) are victims. And we take it willingly without any pushback because there's no alternative. If anyone reading this is interested in helping fight against this or develop an open source alternative specific to government agencies, please reach out to me (email in profile here). I'm very passionate about this, having suffered so much aggravation over the years, and would love to work on bringing about some sort of solution.
It may be the case that code should be released publicly. But their reasoning does not seem applicable.
As for postalrat's comment: there is a certain bureaucratic mindset that wants "their" stuff secret. Even when there's no possible justification. "You can't get in trouble for saying No" is their philosophy.
Example: on Nextdoor (home of the dumbest people on the web), I stopped getting my daily email digest. Since this happens to be my ideal way to get Nextdoo, I emailed Support, and their person insisted that they were going out, and I should contact my email provider (they were not going to Spam, if that's your guess).
I asked "how do you know? did you look in the Sent folder?" and he/she said "we're unable to share any information about our internal tools."
Ooh, it's a SECRET! I went through Twitter and found out they were running an experiment.
They should be leaked to China as sabotage.
Governments pay all the time for development of technology that they buy, but that doesn't mean that the IP is released. For example, the government paid Boeing to develop transport aircraft. However, that does not mean that all the drawings/plans/etc for the aircraft are made public.
The government is buying a set of functionality with public money. As long as they are getting that functionality, it doesn't matter that the code is proprietary.
Of course the SaaS model is much better for developers to realize their worth, because you are essentially creating capital goods as a developer and being the owner of those goods is much more profitable than selling them.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31108570
[1] https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2019/01/the_public-...
[2] https://www.macfound.org/programs/technology/
[3] https://www.fordfoundation.org/news-and-stories/big-ideas/pu...
The (US) government actually tried the approach of purchasing a few initial runs and the plans for some missiles, but the results were bad. Initial development costs were high, reliability was low, and manufacturability was poor.
Now, missile guidance software may not want to be open source, but the navy engineers down at China Lake should definitely have unrestricted ability to read, modify, and reproduce anything developed in their behalf.
Governments are better at keeping ancient records around than most companies.
If you want to sell it then develop it on your own.
This reads way broader, as you describe it "develop it on your own", but can sell it only once to public sector.
What is my incentive to develop any software at all for public sector, since potential client no. 2 will just take the code that I released?
The ask does not state employed by... it just says:
“Implement legislation requiring that publicly financed software developed for the public sector be made publicly available under a Free and Open Source Software licence.”
I would be fine with
“Implement legislation requiring that publicly financed software developed by employees of public sector, for the public sector be made publicly available under a Free and Open Source Software licence.”
Then, sold to public sector once, then everyone else is free to use it.
Would Microsoft still develops Office? Unlikely.
(Obviously, Microsoft's actual business model is to capture and lock in, that's what makes your example look odd.)
Also, government custom developed software is really wonky and the odds that the IP is sold is very low. The greater odds are that maintenance and follow on contracts will only be possible for the company that first wrote the software.
There’s also licensed deals and subscription services etc. sure, but there’s a ton of custom proprietary software that consultants build (which often contain proprietary business logic).
Custom always costs more of course, but this isn’t a new model by any stretch of the imagination.
When there is a need for a system, there is a public procurement process wherein contractors submit bids, and the "best" bid wins. ("best" by some criteria, usually price)
As I private person I can offer a programming projects but demand access to the source code , you are free not to bid for my project but I think I am the sane one that wants the code so i am not locked into a corner.
If the government is paying for the development, the government should own the product of that work.