Switzerland mandates all software developed for the government be open sourced
Switzerland mandates all software developed for the government be open sourced
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 🤷♂️
Awesome!
If only other non-podunk countries would follow suit.
Is their Microsoft deal about to expire?
All governments should take notice
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.
That's a very surprisingly amazing thing of them!
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 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.
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.
That's fucking amazing
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.
Good. Now try ODF, to have a choice aside from MS Office.
Tangential, but there's a long list of government github accounts here: https://government.github.com/community/
common switzerland W
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.
Together monkey strong!!
That's really cool
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.