Switzerland mandates all software developed for the government be open sourced
Switzerland mandates software source code disclosure for public sector: A legal milestone
This doesn’t seem like a big deal?
The fact the code is open sourced is much less significant than the fact now the Swiss government will need to negotiate complete ownership of any software they commission.
That’s going to make things more expensive for them, and limit the vendors prepared to work with them.
Their systems, their call 🤷♂️
At least for ASTRA, for software developed in their projects that’s already the case. Frameworks etc. used are not covered, but all source code for PLC and SCADA are theirs and you’re required to hand over all code as part of documentation at the end. As a zip on a USB key, never to be looked at again.
Wtf is even “ASTRA”
https://www.astra.admin.ch/astra/de/home.html
The English abbreviation is in fact FEDRO.
the fact now the Swiss government will need to negotiate complete ownership of any software they commission.
I can’t find it
No, that is counter intuitive. It may appear more expensive at first, but on the long run it is a lot more cheaper. It avoid vendor lock-in, recurring increase of dev costs and licensing and lots of other plagues of closed proprietary development like blackbox development and justification of hidden complexity as a driving factor on costs. I worked with legacy closed proprietary sw development and lock-in combined with legacy complexity made man-hour costs exorbitant. These are partially solved by open-sourcing, as kicking out a team and putting a new one is easier, but most importantly transparency as a driving factor on quality of development.
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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
Russia does some of it, probably most countries in EU and China do it.
Awesome!
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.
If only other non-podunk countries would follow suit.
Is Switzerland podunk now?
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.
Used to be Lufthansa gave you toblerone
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.
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:
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.
UK too: https://data.gov.uk/
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.
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.
Step 1: all software has to be open source
Step 2: governments, required by law, to fund FOSS projects in their tech stacks. Helped by organizations which trace project funding and lobbying to promote FOSS security by providing funding; a huge incentive to not insert malware
Step 3: coders are afforded dignity (UBI); given funds geared towards affording a maintenance team. Regardless of country of origin. Vital infrastructure is vital infrastructure. Talent is talent.
I support this move to Step 1
Where is the list of pauper gov’ts which force talent to get a job rather than be a talent and then maintain their projects with dignity!
Those jobs are mostly nonsense. Geared towards wasting our time building:
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yet another stupid web site
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yet another stupid smartphone app
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yet another stupid cloud base server instance
Yup and then they move the spyware/malware/etc into a layer below where nobody knows what is inside…
How is your baseband modem in your smartphone doing, by the way?
Separated over the PCIe bus with an IOMMU between it and system memory, as well as hardware switches to disable it if I’m not reachable
I haven’t found a way to remove it entirely. It’s the only option I’ve found so far, but if you know of a better designed option, I’m certainly interested
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I’m curious if this also applies to military or intelligence software. I’m guessing at the very least software embedded in weapons systems is not included. If I understood the article correctly there were some exemptions for security reasons.
Now there is some common sense.
Is their Microsoft deal about to expire?
That’s fucking amazing
Public money, public code!
But it will be written in Schwiizerdütch, so no one outside of Switzerland will understand it. I think it’s a dialect of Perl.
They’ll do with Swiss dialect of Lisp with grüezi instead of define.
Your joke aside, which I thought was funny did remind me that as it happens, the Swiss do an amazing job in making things internationally accessible.
Take for example their spectrum management system that not only allows you to search for categories of users, handles kHz to MHz data entry, gives access to the legal provisions and then the legislation itself, does so in four languages.
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.
You can still pay people to write public code, though. Just because you can use it for free doesn’t mean it always has to be written for free. In some cases, sure, it can make more sense to have it for free if it’s a fully non-profit volunteer-run project, but that is not the only way to write open-source software. Talented developers are still talented, open-source or not.
I don’t think anyone intends public funds to be quite that sticky; public education is itself a public good, and having once attended a public school really has nothing to do with developing a product 20 years down the road.
Also, writing open source code can support a viable business. Not every example has been successful, and some have been sold to hypercapitalist owners who wanted to extract more profit, others have failed to keep up, but Canonical is doing alright with it, Red Hat did for a long time, among others. Plenty of bigger tech companies also employ people to write open source software, despite it not being the company’s main business, React, PyTorch, TensorFlow, and so many other projects. Those engineers definitely aren’t working for free.
govts print infinite money. All of us are working for free. Their fiat is credits for the company store.
If you think funding projects is bad then the response is to support lobbying project owners to put in malware until FOSS is publically funded.
All we have to do is verbally support it. And cheerlead when it occurs. We don’t actually have to actively do it. It’s a threat which is done in politics all the time.
If governments could print infinite money they would just pay themselves an infinite salary.
Your fundamentals of economics is broken.
There’s the difference between individual knowledge (company training) and code licenses though.
Maybe this lazy private money should get a real job if it wants to pay for things to profit off of.
This almost pleases RMS
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!!
