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FSF Campaign : Public Money Should Mean Public Code

posted by cmn32480 on Thursday September 14 2017, @04:01PM   Printer-friendly
from the you-can't-use-logic-to-justify-things dept.

canopic jug writes:

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!

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  • (Score: 1) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Friday September 15 2017, @07:57PM

    by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us (6553) on Friday September 15 2017, @07:57PM (#568665) Journal

    Nonsense. Having the government dependent upon large corporations to do their computing is a complete disaster and sets a bad example for everyone else that it is okay to be dependent on your abusers.

    Or it allows for economic development outside of the realm of government. I'd rather not have the entirety of the economy shifting on having the Guv'mint paid programmers doing their jobs.

    In what world is it true that Free Software never requires updating? Simply pay developers to modify the software as necessary.

    I'm sorry. *Who* pays *which* programmers *what* money *how and when*? To replace the existing system requires something on the scale of the existing system.

    And where I was going with that is that you can have a Word Processor (to pull one example out of the hat) that is essentially complete and really needs no further updating. It can be very primitive (I think of what we were using 35-40 years ago being perfectly adequate for over 99% of current tasks.) And I'm saying that software like that is entirely possible: Get something done, work the bugs out, and let people use it from then on. Except that does not move the economy at all. Or, at least not enough to keep things going.

    Freedom is more important than money, even if what you're saying is true.

    Freedom is important. I'm not saying it isn't. But first tell me how I cook and eat a Freedom. I'm afraid if you force a linear choice between "give me liberty or give me death," you'll find a lot of people will trade their freedom for a Big Mac. And food ranks ahead of freedom in terms of primal needs, or rather, it's lower on Maslow's hierarchy if you believe in that.

    I'm not sure how anyone can argue it's a good thing for the government to be dependent upon large corporations and essentially use black boxes to do all of its computing; that is just foolish.

    If computing wasn't the coin of the realm it wouldn't matter. If the basis of our economy would be mining instead of service then I'd say be careful of saying one should metal detect instead of dealing with Asarco and Reynolds holding.
    But if the black boxes put out the same answer as transparent box, but also the black box causes more taxes to be paid and secondary investments to happen from the profits.... yeah, I'm not scared of letting them have the black boxes.

    --
    This sig for rent.