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Comment by anon-3988 | Hacker News Reader

I am fully in support of such initiative. So I am interested to hear what the possible downsides are? Please share your opinions on the matter as I can only see upsides to this.

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I am in support of it too, ultimately, but after working on federal government software projects, it is a very huge uphill battle.

Consider this: your trying to build a grants management system for Defense contractors in Afghanistan. You want to make sure that public money is not going to terrorists sanctioned by the US government. There is a forensic accounting software platform widely used by firms that audit the banking industry,but it is closed source and sold to firms commercially. Should the government spend money on making new software or license the existing software that works extremely well? Should the configuration for what the government creates on that software be open to the public, and open to competitors to imitate? Should they demand that the source code is released? Also what about national security?

Would AWS release all their source code to retain their largest customer, the US government?

I agree that the amount of closed source software used in government projects is staggering and a legitimate barrier to government IT working properly. But the broken process that governments spend money is a bureaucratic nightmare. I am not sure their would be technical downsides, but absolutely their are political ones.

The only thing that I could imagine being an actual downside is the retention of confidential information in the interest of national security or public trust. That is a political minefield already, and open source code can help with security, so I don't even think that is the largest hurdle.

Seems like in your example they should make or buy as they see best fit, but if they make they should make it public. If it could conceivably be a military secret then I expect it would be exempt.

I don't see anything about copyleft style policies here which you seem to be referencing heavily, where are you getting that from?

But that is how the government operates - what is the point of requiring the government to have all the software they develop be open source when they are contracting out all software development to contractors that develop on proprietary platforms? It's not like the government is hiring software engineers in a meaningful capacity, at least not the US government.

I don't know what to tell you (tried and failed to get a number for programmers employed by the USG, its enough that they have a reputation for not paying as well as private sector), but it sounds like you made up a requirement and got mad about it?

I'm not mad. But if your goal is to open source code and software developed with taxpayer money, its not as straightforward as this initiative makes it out to be.

> Would AWS release all their source code to retain their largest customer, the US government?

Yes. Companies would comply with whatever requirement to have the US government as a customer.

They could sue, they could drop them as a client and not bid, they could offer reduced services like they already do with gov cloud, there are a lot of ways this could play out. Apple has shown that private corporations aren't ready to blindly comply with the US government if it doest suit their business interests.

Apple wasn't selling to the US government. They just received a request from a tribunal. There was no money for them in that.

Completely different situation.

I suspect many stakeholders would not like their dirty laundry aired so publicly, which is an obvious good outcome for most people but not the heads of departments and large consulting companies that get big contracts.

Maybe we'd finally be able to tell which consulting companies actually output decent software, if any.

none?

I’ve been employed as a software developer for my state for almost 2 decades and just wonder what software should be included. I would guess 75% of what I develop is internal services and intranet garbage. The rest is one off tools full of garbage code and hardcoded credentials.

Should other divisions that are also publicly funded also have their work available to the public? Perhaps HR should have a GitHub repo for all of their communications?

The downside is public shame. Governmrnt code is no worse than private code and is usually of very low quality and hints at tought organisational problems and outright fraud.

It takes more effort to make internal code FOSS (i.e. upstreaming changes, protecting internal parts, etc.) - and often very few other people use it or contribute back anyway.

I think it'd make more sense as part of a unified effort - like all EU countries agreeing to provide one digital ID service. But that itself is a much bigger issue due to differing levels of digital services, bureaucracy, etc.

I still support it though, and donate to FSF Europe every year with my company donation.

For the common folk, there's no downside. For the people in power, more transparency means fewer avenues to exercise control, fewer places to hide activity.

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