The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) is now running a campaign to require that publicly financed software developed for the public sector be made publicly available under a Free and Open Source Software licence. The reason being that if it is public money, the code should be public as well. General benefits include overall tax savings, increased collaboration, public service, and fostering innovation. Money is currently being wasted on code that cannot be modified or even studied, let alone redistributed. Code paid for by the people should be available to the people!
(Score: 4, Interesting) by arcz on Thursday September 14 2017, @09:17PM
The only license that would be appropriate for publicly funded software is public domain. Any other license, including GPL, BSD, etc. is just catering to special interests. The injustice of proprietary software being publically funded does not make open source somehow better than proprietary software. Either the software is owned by the public, or it is not. There's no moral benefit to open source licensing over commercial licensing.