Meanwhile my country's apps don't let you open them if you have Developer Options enabled on android :)
this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2024
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Which country?
India
Same here, sure there's hacks and workarounds that don't require root... But still why the extra step...
I just want my window animation speed to be faster, why does that disqualify me from reading stuff sent to my government mailbox.
And they'll prob make it illegal for you to bypass and hide developer options because to them that means you're hacking them.
Country: it’s illegal to have software development skills 🤡
Well, in the last few years there was that guy politicians labelled a criminal because he inspected a web page and disclosed multiple amateur vulnerabilities.
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Public money, public code!
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.
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.
There's the difference between individual knowledge (company training) and code licenses though.
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.
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But it will be written in Schwiizerdütch, so no one outside of Switzerland will understand it. I think it's a dialect of Perl.
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.
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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.
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.
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Hopefully more governments will follow this. At the very least, the taxpayer should have the right for whatever software's source code that it funds development.
That's really cool
Together monkey strong!!
Tangential, but there's a long list of government github accounts here: https://government.github.com/community/
Nice, so everyone will see the shitty code used by the administration
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That's disappointing, they should mandate obligatory WhatsApp use country wide.
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Can't wait for our US government to catch up never.
They actively fight progress in some areas.
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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.
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.
I guess it's not convenient to have Microsoft and Apple scan your company images and employee emails. Even take screenshots automatically if they can get away with it.
Appearently other countries are fine with this, which surprises me much more.
I guess the corpo version of windows have these sort of things turned off? But ms can turn them on whenever they want.
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I wonder how this will impact us infrastructure types. I am sure there must have been an exception to the rule at least once in my career but I can't recall any, code I have made for all governments has been open source and if you lost it somehow I would just email it.
My only concern would be the systems that my code runs on top of won't be willing to share. It is one thing to demand it from me, another to demand it from Siemens. Then you add in very low level code for individual devices such as VFDs
I guess the nightmare would be that PLC/DCS/VFD makers would basically be blacklisted and I would have to work around that fact.
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I hope more governments do this, especially after how unsurprisingly shit (read: insecure) microsoft has become.
Has become? When was it ever not?
Yeah it's always been shit but I do think they may have been referencing how the number of exploits and malware has only gotten worse over the years
All governments should take notice
Good. Now try ODF, to have a choice aside from MS Office.
common switzerland W
I think that's a good call.
If the people are paying for it through taxes, it shouldn't be contracted out to some company who lock further development behind their continued involvement.
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