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Comment by pms | Hacker News Reader

You point out that things are not as they should be and argue that changing them will be hard, because that's how they are... to me, these points are a great motivation to introduce the legislature:

A. Such initiatives make government aware of the value of open-source systems to the public.

B. Ok, then this legislature would contribute to the reduction of inequality.

C. Better to fix bugs early than wait until they have catastrophic consequences.

D. Are you saying that we should let bad things continue happening?

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A. Few people outside of tech care; this won't bring votes.

B. Yes but the private contractors like the current status quo. More profit for them.

C. It's not always possible. Bureaucracy is a very big factor in such cases and it can't be fixed.

D. Of course not. The thing is that there are a lot of people that "profit" from this situation. And unfortunately these are more or less the same people that can decide in favour of making the open source everything move. And because of A there won't be much pressure for changes.

A. Tech is huge. 4% of US workforce is the universally cited number.

EU ICT workers are 9 mln out of 193mln workforce, this is 4.7%. We are just not aware of our political power.

B. I work for public institutions, and I use Postgres, not Oracle. When Docker Desktop hit, we moved to podman. Public procurement is a hell, Open Source is the default option and only RedHat and VMWare still reap billions in profits from new public contracts.

C. Biggest roadblock to opensourcing is low quality of code. When we open-source, it is usually total crap that only hinders the image of public institutions. Really important, high-value code stays in private hands like this price matching algorithm for EU energy markets [1]

[1] https://www.nordpoolgroup.com/globalassets/download-center/s...

D. How would you audit open source? Using sloccount and its estimate of man-hours based on Basic COCOMO model? This is laughable at best. Yes, it puts public spending under scrutiny and puts public institutions into a defense position. But this is how things are in healthy democracies already.

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