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Comment by sschueller | Hacker News Reader

"The Swiss Post Design System pattern library for a unified and accessible user experience accross the web platform." [1]

I really appreciate government and publicly funded organizations open sourcing their work. Another example is Swiss Television and their apps[2] or government apps[3]. The public paid for it so they should also be able to benefit from all the work.

[1] https://github.com/swisspost/design-system

[2] https://github.com/SRGSSR

[3] https://github.com/admin-ch

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> I really appreciate government and publicly funded organizations open sourcing their work. Another example is Swiss Television and their apps[2] or government apps[3]. The public paid for it so they should also be able to benefit from all the work.

The Free Software Foundation Europe agrees: https://fsfe.org/activities/publiccode/publiccode.en.html

Unfortunately, not all government apps are open source.

In general this seems fair, but it also creates an externality. A licensing system that offers a permissive license to the community that paid for it, and a more restrictive licensing terms for people in parts beyond seems more fair. Thinking of the United States, I could easily imagine that some states would just wait to copy the services developed by one of the larger states - which creates an unfair free rider situation.

My $0.02: At least me, as a tax payer, would like to be able to say "yes, please give to to free riders". I already paid for my problem to be solved and I did so, because the solution was worth the price. That's where my math ends (unless someone pays me to do some more math). Yes, please take my solution, just don't bother me with support or feature requests; I'll pass along the number of the company that implemented the solution.

To which realistic disadvantage of the originator? Even in a scenario in which this becomes common practice and in which other organizations are indeed reusing the shared code (and that is a big if!), you could still argue that the originator benefits by attracting talent, shaping standards, positioning themselves as digital leaders, bringing transparency into what happens with taxpayers money, ...

It's a classic free rider problem. Some jurisdictions will chronically under invest because they can rely on the largesse of others. The incentive for every jurisdiction would be to degenerate into becoming free riders.

This doesn't happen in the corporate world (as much) because of various factors such as tax incentives and market pressures, but would be much more likely in the stately world of government IT.

A better solution would be license the code, such that it could not be used to provide public services unless the governing body contributed to a development association (either in money, code contributions, or some mixture thereof).

> The incentive for every jurisdiction would be to degenerate into becoming free riders.

Only societies starved of ideas other than lowest common denominator free-market thinking. In reality societies choose to do the thng that cost money, for no other reason than that they want the outcome. We do tons of things for no specific (short term) gain. Some would say that this is what sets a great civilization apart from the rest.

Its not a classic free rider problem. Because the service does not degrade for the people who originally wrote the software. The original authors couldn't care less if somebody else under invests.

Not much of a United States when you think the other states might be taking advantage of your state. How can you prosper as a strong union with that attitude?

Similarly, other countries might just use science funded by the US - is that also an unfair free rider situation?

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