Switzerland mandates all software developed for the government be open sourced
Switzerland mandates software source code disclosure for public sector: A legal milestone
Public money, public code!
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.
Maybe this lazy private money should get a real job if it wants to pay for things to profit off of.
But it will be written in Schwiizerdütch, so no one outside of Switzerland will understand it. I think it’s a dialect of Perl.
This is the way it should be. Governments around the world have spent decades enriching big tech with public money, when they could have pooled their resources and built FOSS software that benefited everyone.
Same goes for science and everything else funded by tax payers.
Meanwhile my country’s apps don’t let you open them if you have Developer Options enabled on android :)
Which country?
India
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.
bites lip, damn Switzerland…. that is hot as fuck
This makes me curious in the US on whether or not government app source code would be provided via a FOIA request.
You’d think so, but the answer is no. They’ve employed companies like Microsoft, Oracle, etc. to write up the security handbooks that says proprietary software is more secure. Heck, even electronic voting systems in the US is closed-source.
Heck, even electronic voting systems in the US is closed-source.
How can elections even be trusted to be fair in that case?
By claiming that everyone who do not trust is
communisttrumpistI think we’re well past the open/closed discussion when hackers have repeatedly shown how easy it is to compromise the voting machines.
We know they’re trash, it’s not theory.
Security by obscurity the 100% least effective security measure! Wait what? MS left the government knowingly vulnerable for years for the shareholders?! That’s some good security right there!
I don’t agree with the generalization here. Sure, it is generally advisable not to rely on security through obscurity, but depending on the use-cases and purpose it can be effective.
I dislike DRM systems with a passion, but they, especially those for video games like denuvo, can be quite effective, if the purpose is to protect against copying something for a short time until it gets cracked.
Otherwise I agree that software developed in the open is intrinsically more secure, because it can be verified by everyone.
However, many business and governments like to have support contracts so want to be able to sue and blame someone else than themselves if something goes wrong. This is in most cases easier with closed source products with a specific legal entity behind it, not a vague and loose developer community or even just a single developer.
Generally, works of the US government are public domain.
However, most apps are produced on contract with development companies, and I expect the contract specifies that the rights remain with the developer.
Wwwaiiiiiittt… So does this mean OS too? Is an entire country switching to the dark side? Linux, I mean Linux
“Windows wasn’t developed for the Swiss government, it was developed for the general public and we adopted it off the shelf.”
Found the Swiss, can’t even take a joke¡
the right side
Together monkey strong!!
That’s fucking amazing
Wasn’t there EU-wide law about it?
Switzerland isn’t in the EU
It is however in the schengen area. so regulatory alignment on a lot of issues is still required as if they were members
Not really, Schengen is for travel purposes mostly. Switzerland applies many EU regulations but that’s “voluntary”.
Ah. Right. It’s easy to forget it.
Open source will always be the best option, especially with a government supporting it! Imagine what government funding could do to accelerate improvements to Linux
All governments should take notice
Now there is some common sense.
That’s really cool
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.
Whilst we’re at it, consider the impact of open data, where government datasets are available to the community
*imagines Moscow* You still would need more trees and fix old rain drain system.
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:
UK too: https://data.gov.uk/
Here’s Tasmania:
And here’s the ACT:
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.
Yeah, same kind of process in Oz.
AFAIK, it was triggered by doing an annual event called GovHack where people were encouraged to create “hacks” with government data. It included software developers like me, data mentors from many different government departments, people with an interest and several departments with questions.
I think NZ’s is a similar story. GovHack is run in NZ as well, though I haven’t personally been involved in an event.
A decade ago I participated in three and won several awards but was disappointed with the government response to all our collective efforts and stopped participating.
Specifically “not invented here” was prevalent as a response to projects that represented hundreds of man-hours of effort.
It was demoralising to say the least.
I’m not sure what the missing ingredient was, but two of our projects were directly related to government effort in relation to public transport and public housing. Neither went anywhere despite face to face presentations to senior stakeholders in the relevant departments.
The third was a search engine with a completely different approach to that in use by the popular engines.
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.
the Swiss government, namely ASTRA.
