Switzerland mandates all software developed for the government be open sourced
Switzerland mandates software source code disclosure for public sector: A legal milestone
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).
Who is “they” in your statement?
If it’s the company who is contracted by the government, it seems obvious (to me) that the requirements to make it open source provides the push to make it public.
If it’s the government, then I don’t understand your point.
Whilst we’re at it, consider the impact of open data, where government datasets are available to the community.
That sounds like it would be pretty useful to get better quality statistical research papers (well, I guess quality would depend more upon the researcher), doable by people without corporate backing.
Isn’t it already available in a lot of cases?
Here’s some of what’s happening in my country, Australia:
- https://data.gov.au/
- https://data.wa.gov.au/
- https://data.qld.gov.au/
- https://data.nsw.gov.au/
- https://data.vic.gov.au/
- https://data.sa.gov.au/
- https://data.nt.gov.au/
Not sure where Tasmania and the ACT are at, but those links are the federal and most state government data portals.
Behind that is much variety of data, from land use to baby names and everything in-between.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics has its own site:
NZ as well: https://data.govt.nz
Though this it takes work for the different government departments to maintain. The team at data.govt.nz work with the different government departments to try to identify suitable data sources and get them into an update cycle, but there’s definitely not all data that can be released on there.
Here’s Tasmania:
And here’s the ACT:
UK too: https://data.gov.uk/
