1. healthcare.gov
2. Stoplights/traffic control cameras.
3. Voting machines.
4. Electrical grid.
5. IRS.
There are companies (including Siemens, for example) which build traffic lights and sell the control software and algorithms for eg car and pedestrian detection. See https://www.speedcamerasuk.com/speed-camera-types.htm
In a lot of places, the government decides that a service is required and companies bid for the construction rights. Just because public money was used to buy a service doesn't make the IP the property of the public.
And in response to a sibling comment, no, the government does not always pay for code development. The company decides they have some niche IP (eg car detection) and start selling speed cameras. They then bid for government contracts.
You could argue that there is an onus on government to use open hardware and software where possible. It often costs them less money, for a start. I suspect its easier to run an open source focused company and aim to be a major government contractor than it is to persuade the government to buy open source.
No, but it could. Might raise costs initially, but the idea is that enforcing such a spending policy would lower costs and reduce duplication long term. Not to mention that having law and beurocracy enforced by closed source systems is a major threat to freedom and democracy, of course.
2, 3, and 4 are made by private companies. Not government.
5. Probably a good idea.
You probably wouldn't want their fraud detection/audit selection software published. No matter how good it is releasing it gives people a chance to better avoid detection.
I'm mostly thinking of it from a law-abiding citizen perspective. Maybe make some basic tests available to more easily show that I'm not making the stupid mistakes (an extra "0" somewhere or missing a digit somewhere else).
Also, anything that would more easily interface with the IRS's online submission system would be great.
But government pays them to develop the code. For many such companies government is the only customer (whom else are you going to sell the traffic light software to?).
The traffic lights in Chicago are likely made by a different company than the traffic lights in New York City (I dunno for sure... but it'd be a separate arrangement nonetheless). Those are two grossly different customers.
USA has a federal society: that means we have mini-governments across the country with their own laws and regulations. In an extreme case, an Home-owners association can own traffic lights and operate roads. (My own HOA for example owns the traffic lights in my area, and hires cops from the county to patrol our roads. They're county-cops contracted out to the Homeowner's Association for security in the neighborhood)
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Same thing with voting booths, and other services. They're made by private companies in the USA, to serve the many different local governments that exist.
And local governments interact with local neighborhoods / homeowners associations, depending on local regulations of course.
The underlying argument you're making comes down to this idea that capitalist competition is the most efficient way to produce results, but it's obviously incorrect in this case. Are we really arguing that having a bunch of different companies developing the same software a bunch of times for different governments is the most efficient way to do this?
That's an assumption that isn't always true.
The company could have developed them with their own funds, then sell the product to the government.
Matt Cutts if you're reading this please help!
On another note, I'm not sure I agree on the electrical grid or traffic controls being open sourced ... could imagine some nefarious things happening as a result of that
Any more nefarious things that can be done with your Linux OS server talking to your Open Source Chromium / Firefox web browser?
Open Source doesn't necessarily mean less secure.
However, I would imagine it would still be beneficial for open analysis though. I'm not sure security through obscurity is a good option when there are motivated nefarious actors involved. But that's more of a "gut feel" than based on any evidence
As to TFA, I have mixed feelings. I'm actually more concerned about research and related patents and data surrounding publicly funded study. I do feel that Open-Source should be given some level of preference, but not that all publicly funded software should be open source itself. It's a blurry line imho.
In principle I completely agree that things being in the open should help to harden them, but especially in the US where funding is often used as a bargaining chip and bureaucracy is rampant I get a bit nervous
How many poorly maintained/updated/configured Linux hosts are out there? Same for Windows, etc... in the end, the software can be the greatest, but if the host's configuration is poorly setup/managed, what does it matter.
While this will also make abusing security flaws easier, I think there is also a real benefit to forcing it to be public that could potentially outweigh the risks of doing such.
Maybe the answer is very good logging of anyone who has cloned the repos etc. but right now when we have a government that uses whether or not they're going to fund important parts of our infrastructure (like Air Traffic Controllers) as a bargaining chip I have some skepticism around them being willing to fund ongoing maintenance of some of these products.
Despite the fact that things being in the open SHOULD curb this from happening I've read enough legislation (yes, I actually do like to read legislation) to know that that probably is not true when it comes to the government
def foo(**kwargs):
<insert code here>
return how_much_you_owe x = gross_income / median_income;
if( x <= 1 )
{
return 0;
}
if( x <= 50 )
{
y = ( x * Math.ln( x ) - x + 1 ) / Math.ln( 2500 );
}
else
{
y = x - 0.5 * Math.ln( 50 ) * Math.li( x ) + 4.862;
}
return y * median_income;
The constants are based on the income at 50 times the median income having a marginal tax rate of 50%, and the median income having a marginal tax rate of 0%. Marginal tax rates above 50% asymptotically approach 100%. There are no loopholes or exemptions.
If the median income is $32k, and you earned $31k, your tax is zero. Your only obligation is to report your gross income honestly, so that the median income is calculated accurately for next year. If your income is $96k, your x = 3.0, your y = 0.1656, so your tax is $15.9k . If your income is $1.6M, your x = 50, your y = 18.74, so your tax is $600k . If your income is $32M, your x = 1000, your y = 657.5, and your tax = $21M.
The only effective ways to reduce your tax would be to reduce your income (as reported) or raise the nationwide median income, such as by paying your lowest-paid workers more in the previous year.
Seems fair to me.
Your argument rests on the presumption that the economy needs super-rich people to be performant, when corporations and governments have already solved the problem of collaborative concentration of capital. If they leave, and the economy somehow fails to collapse, they have shown the lie behind rich folks as "job creators".
Economies are run by the people who do the work. Sitting on ass and writing checks serves to weed out some of the worst ideas, and shuffling financial instruments serves to lubricate the gears of the economic machine, but should the rich ever go on strike, they will immediately lose all their leverage as the economy restructures itself to work without them. At worst, they can just get replaced by newly-minted rich people.
And, contrariwise, when a nation coddles its billionaires, and lets them do whatever they want, that's how you get the current US government. Nobody's starving, though. Not yet. We still might check that off with another government shutdown and another trade war escalation and another diplomatic insult or provocation.
Committing to give people someone else's money is every government expenditure that is paid for by taxation. It's the welfare state. It's the military-industrial complex. It's infrastructure projects. It's corruption. It's operating funds for regulatory agencies. It's foreign adventurism. Everything. Most governments have budgets that are funded entirely by "somebody else's money". You have made several unspoken assumptions in this discussion, and I think it may be best for you to make them explicit before continuing.
People aren't leaving Venezuela because taxes are high. And Venezuela's problems aren't a result of rich folks fleeing to Miami and Madrid. They are all leaving--the non-government rich, the middle-class, and the poor--because price-fixing creates shortages, and there is no such thing as a free lunch. If one pays for the party with oil money, one also has to turn off the music when the international commodity price for Venezuelan crude oil goes down. But they didn't turn it off; they turned it up.
Can you provide any details on Venezuela's progressive income tax? All I could find was a flat 34% tax on income for nonresidents, and that the lowest rate for residents might be 6%. Which Venezuelans left specifically because they didn't want to pay 34%?
If you add up all the incomes of all the tax-paying entities, it should equal the money supply multiplied by the velocity, minus the unreported income economy.
I think that statement is against the very idea of tax law :)
Everybody got very enthousiastic at the begining, then realized:
- it was written in a niche proprietary language: M
- it was provided with almost zero doc or comments
- the process of getting the code was tedious, and the law changes every year
- taxes are complicated
And so nobody did anything with it ever since.
M is also the name of the built in language in Microsoft Power Query.
More than that, there is no "public paid", just "tax paid". That makes the tax payers entitled to some of that code, not someone else. With taxes paid on so many layers (federation, state, county, city) the ownership and entitlement is also layered: if a small town pays for some software, should the entire country get it? Why?
So to start the FOSS process there is a need to somehow have for each niche a GPL software base that cuts costs by a lot.
There's Open Source and then there's the Licensing of Open Source. Just because the source is available does not automatically mean it's free to use under any circumstance.
Licensing is a separate and complicated issue.
Isn't this the purpose of the GPL? "Sure, you can use our code, but any additions need to be reusable as well, so everyone is contributing fairly."
Unless, of course, countries B,C,D don't change anything, in which case, no actual loss to country A.
If you think this should be open source, do you then carry that logic to demand that all government vehicles run on open source software as well?
In my local community, the government does not own the traffic control cameras. They contract out agreements to maintain cameras at intersections that meet constraints.
I'm not necessarily against the idea of the government being restricted to using 100% open source hardware, but that's super radically different than "software the government owns should be open source".