Switzerland mandates all software developed for the government be open sourced
Switzerland mandates software source code disclosure for public sector: A legal milestone
Public money, public code!
IMO this should be the case for everything developed using public money, looking at you, pharmaceutical companies…
But it will be written in Schwiizerdütch, so no one outside of Switzerland will understand it. I think it’s a dialect of Perl.
They’ll do with Swiss dialect of Lisp with grüezi instead of define.
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.
Wwwaiiiiiittt… So does this mean OS too? Is an entire country switching to the dark side? Linux, I mean Linux
“Windows wasn’t developed for the Swiss government, it was developed for the general public and we adopted it off the shelf.”
Found the Swiss, can’t even take a joke¡
All governments should take notice
Meanwhile my country’s apps don’t let you open them if you have Developer Options enabled on android :)
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 🤡
Tangential, but there’s a long list of government github accounts here: https://government.github.com/community/
I work for a company which creates software for the government. Super exited for more OSS projects.
the government.
The Swiss government? What’s it like?
Yep, the swiss government. Complicated is probably the best word to describe it. We are a very decentralized country (which makes sense for a country that was founded as a coalition to fight the royals that oppressed its people, none of those partners want someone to rule them) so every canton (state) does a lot of things differently than the other ones. But it is nice to see that after years of neglect they try to actually push digitalization by establishing common standards and systems.
Can somebody explain me Proton in detail? 😉
I would love to but the explanation is private.
It is something that is not Electron
100% accurate!
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.
I’ll gladly upload my stuff into some repo they allow me to. I’ve inquired about it in the past - I wrote a piece of sw that fills a requirement hole left by a widely used SCADA tool - but they outright forbid it. That was about a year ago.
My point is less about open source and more about how they have no clue how to handle their IP even now. It’s a nice gesture at best (at least currently. Maybe there’s more on the way).
Who is “they” in your statement?
If it’s the company who is contracted by the government, it seems obvious (to me) that the requirements to make it open source provides the push to make it public.
If it’s the government, then I don’t understand your point.
the Swiss government, namely ASTRA.
Wasn’t there EU-wide law about it?
Switzerland isn’t in the EU
It is however in the schengen area. so regulatory alignment on a lot of issues is still required as if they were members
Not really, Schengen is for travel purposes mostly. Switzerland applies many EU regulations but that’s “voluntary”.
This makes me curious in the US on whether or not government app source code would be provided via a FOIA request.
You’d think so, but the answer is no. They’ve employed companies like Microsoft, Oracle, etc. to write up the security handbooks that says proprietary software is more secure. Heck, even electronic voting systems in the US is closed-source.
Heck, even electronic voting systems in the US is closed-source.
How can elections even be trusted to be fair in that case?
Simply, you can’t. I’m personally all for an open source alternative for electronic voting. I can bank online, but not vote online. I’d trust an open source online voting platform more than I’d trust poll workers to not skew some votes. I’d also like to be able to track my vote and ensure it was cast for the person I voted for.
