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Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

Completely agree - it is a civic duty, and if you'll forgive me for link-dropping I remain unapologetic about it - http://www.oss4gov.org/manifesto and even see the unapology. There is a growing movement of placing OSS in government (see the service design manual on gov.uk - the UK government demands that new software is built in an Agile way(?!). - code for America do some really good civic hacking stuff (recent hackday had 90k people). But you don't have to be part of some movement - just be writing and releasing. Debian is still doing it after 20 years - far longer than most of us will ever stay in one job.

Edit: originally this was a comment on site but seemed to vanish.

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I like this. I'd would wish it was a demand that Gov services used open source. Sure pay a company to build whatever, but make sure they publicise the code.

Would make companies that take government missions more transparent. Writing tests, decent docs.

I was tempted to start a nationwide campaign of hackers calling their local councillors. Apparently it has been tried before and fell foul of competitive ruling - disallowing private companies is seen as state aid. I suspect that is because large (US) multinationals were being blocked by small local integrators, so came up with that. I think there should be a way around it

I would gladly contribute free software to government the same moment I start getting free health care, education, housing, electricity, child care and other things. Until then, no thanks. I pay taxes, and that's enough of the contribution to the society from my side.

You should probably read what I wrote again. I didn't say the government should rely on hacker on their free time. I said whoever they assign government contracts should have their code setup as open source. Naturally the government would still pay that company, but the code would be open source.

Would you say the same for cars. For example, whenever government pay for a new car fleet, car designs should become open source and be available to all other members of the society free of charge. See the point? Why should only software vendors and developers be expected to provide the outcome of their hard work as open source?

The government should use already established OSS. It's not agile to make a document reader from scratch, to increase the credibility of your work, when it's already created.

I don't think anyone is arguing for that. There are literally thousands of services govt is required to provide that do not currently have an OSS analogue - and yet there are proprietary solutions for them. We argue that taxpayer money should only go to fund development of code that is already or will be reased under a free and open license.

Look at http://www.oss4gov.org/manifesto

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