Switzerland mandates all software developed for the government be open sourced
Switzerland mandates software source code disclosure for public sector: A legal milestone
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.
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.
Same here, sure there’s hacks and workarounds that don’t require root… But still why the extra step…
I just want my window animation speed to be faster, why does that disqualify me from reading stuff sent to my government mailbox.
Which country?
India
Public money, public code!
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.
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.
You can still pay people to write public code, though. Just because you can use it for free doesn’t mean it always has to be written for free. In some cases, sure, it can make more sense to have it for free if it’s a fully non-profit volunteer-run project, but that is not the only way to write open-source software. Talented developers are still talented, open-source or not.
