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posted by mrpg on Sunday June 03 2018, @05:33AM   Printer-friendly
from the what-happened-to-free-software? dept.

New policy pushes for open source in California agencies

[...] The California Department of Technology released a letter this week announcing a new policy — called the Open Source and Code Reuse Policy — elevating the use of open source software across state government. Agencies and state entities are asked to develop, purchase or reuse open source software — anything with source code that is publicly available to view, adapt, or reuse — for new IT projects as a first option where it is financially viable. (There are a few exceptions, such as cases that would threaten national or state security.)

The policy is also applied retroactively to existing state-built software, requiring agencies to make such code "broadly available for reuse across state government in a consistent manner." The policy notes that reusing custom-developed code across state agencies "can have significant benefits for taxpayers, including decreasing duplicative costs" and is intended to "promote innovation and collaboration across state government."

Non-open-source software will still be permitted — an official from the California Department of Technology assured StateScoop that the state wants to keep the door open for its vendor partners, but emphasized that open source has value that warrants strong consideration by agencies.


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday June 03 2018, @10:29AM (5 children)

    Good on em. This may be the first time California has ever attempted to lessen the burden on taxpayers without epic amounts of bitching occurring.

    --
    My rights don't end where your fear begins.
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  • (Score: 1) by MikeVDS on Sunday June 03 2018, @08:30PM (1 child)

    by MikeVDS (1142) on Sunday June 03 2018, @08:30PM (#688088)

    I worked for the State of CA for 13 years. I hope this works for them and continues, but everything moves extremely slow in the state. In 2015 I was a Chief Engineer, working on Windows XP with MS Office 2003 (might have even been 97), on hardware that could hardly run that software and it was "completely locked down". I could not open the docx or xlsx files that were regularly sent to me. I would boot into Linux from a flash drive to make my computer somewhat functional. AutoCAD was the only reason I needed to go back to Windows.

    I think it will be a long time before these massive departments migrate over. The peons at every level will fight change of any sort. All the people abusing the system, taking kickbacks for purchasing large amounts of software licenses, will argue that their job cannot be done without spending millions of taxpayers dollars on proprietary software.

    • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 03 2018, @09:04PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 03 2018, @09:04PM (#688100)

      Which, at that point, had been obsolete since the previous calendar year. [google.com]

      on hardware that could hardly run that software

      Munich saw this coming (W2k - eXPee transition, actually) and decided to go with their own distro based on Debian Linux (later, Ubuntu-based).
      They saved millions and millions.

      Can't wait to see what the voters in Munich have to say about the decision of the politicians to go back to Windoze & proprietary software and the estimated 100 million that that will cost.

      -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 03 2018, @08:50PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 03 2018, @08:50PM (#688096)

    To stretch the point a bit, there's considerable overlap with consumers and taxpayers.
    Some of our Insurance Commissioners in Cali have been really on the ball in lessening the burden put on us by insurance companies (who produce nothing, BTW; FIRE sector again).

    So, referring to our anti-government Soylentils, even a blind hog does find an acorn now and then.

    .
    WRT FOSS, it's nice to see a place in USA catching up with numerous places in EU.
    ...and Malaysia.gov has been 100 percent FOSS for some years now.
    ...and the autonomous region of Extremadura in Spain made major strides[1] [google.com] before them.
    The public school system of Brazil has had over 500,000 Linux seats since early in this decade (the largest Linux deployment with a common IT administration of which I am aware).

    [1] If you also see 40,000, that's the mopping-up portion.

    -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]

    • (Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Sunday June 03 2018, @10:13PM (1 child)

      by realDonaldTrump (6614) on Sunday June 03 2018, @10:13PM (#688115) Homepage Journal

      Malaysia.gov doesn't open on my phone. "Webpage not available"

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 04 2018, @02:53AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 04 2018, @02:53AM (#688196)

        Not even if you lowercase the M?? 8;-)

        -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]