Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

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I don't agree with this. The government should purchase software or services based on quality of the service provided and cost. It's nice if the software is open source, but it doesn't need to be just because tax payers pay for it. That's a total non-sequitur.

If the government buys Mercedes cars it doesn't demand Mercedes to hand over the engineering designs for the cars.

In fact in the entire military and intelligence space I don't even think this is practically possible due to secrecy and avoiding to give away software that is vital to national security.

Another obviously giant issue is that this would effectively prohibit companies which do proprietary work in the private sector to work with the government at the same time, because they'd be forced to open source their code. The likely result of this would simply be that the government has significantly less software to chose from, higher cost, or needs to start maintaining large engineering teams to replicate entire software stacks just for public use.

> I don't agree with this.

Probably because you missed the "custom made" part.

> secrecy and avoiding to give away software that is vital to national security.

This would obviously be an exception and the code wouldn't be publicized. But that doesn't mean it can't be open-source to the government itself.

> this would effectively prohibit companies who do proprietary work in the private sector to work with the government at the same time, because they'd be forced to open source their code.

Developing open-source code doesn't mean you have to open-source all your code. Windows is still closed-source despite Visual Studio Code being open.

So taking your example, the government could not use Windows unless Microsoft decides to open-source it? You realise how much infrastructure of the government runs on Windows right? And not just the operating system itself, but large parts of the software on top, you'd basically have to spend, I don't know dozens of billions to port it all to open-source software, just so you get the source code? Mind you that open-source software is not free, Redhat charges you money just the same for enterprise software

I don't think that's a reasonable use of taxpayer money.

For what it’s worth Microsoft regularly shares the source code for Windows with the American government.

> So taking your example, the government could not use Windows unless Microsoft decides to open-source it?

Incorrect. The government could use Windows, even closed sourced. That is why I pointed out the "custom made" part you again missed. The open-source mandate would only apply to new software, written specifically for the government.

>So taking your example, the government could not use Windows unless Microsoft decides to open-source it?

No, that's a strawman.

Windows is supporting tech. There is no such requirement.

Custom made software is not, and requirement should be for it.

> this would effectively prohibit companies who do proprietary work in the private sector to work with the government at the same time, because they'd be forced to open source their code.

The company that does implementation work wouldn't be influenced IMO in any way whatsoever - they already have an active deal with gov, they are 100% on the topic, they have the best chance to offer quality support as they developed it etc. The other gov client who takes that software and does't pay development will pay support to the same company and additional development in majority of cases. First client could incorporate such changes without any additional price making entire ecosystem better. If third company now devotes its time to study, and improve the open code, so that they are now better at it then original company who developed it, then by all the logic they are the right team to continue with it. This effectually reduces lock in which is the major problem. Academia could research those open systems to look for bugs and other defects and provide stream of fresh minds already prepared to work on the gov systems. It looks like too good to be true IMO.

> If the government buys Mercedes cars it doesn't demand Mercedes to hand over the engineering designs for the cars.

> In fact in the entire military and intelligence space I don't even think this is practically possible due to secrecy and avoiding to give away software that is vital to national security.

The military is likely a case where the government does demand the engineering designs, production lines etc.

Open source doesn't have to mean public source, it means the user has access to the source and can modify the program if they want to. Seems like a perfectly reasonable approach for military or intelligence procurement.

The user, as the government agency getting the outcome of the contractors work, already has access to the source code most of the time.

Not really.

Yes, really, anecdote of one.

All the government projects I worked on, used SCM systems managed by government IT departments.

Also zero contributions were made back from the FOSS stuff that were used in the project, they were kept in their IT SCM repositories.

All the government projects I worked on, they had lost of contractors with proprietary software interconnecting between each other.

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