[HN Gopher] Congress should invest in open-source software
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Congress should invest in open-source software
Author : gilad
Score : 568 points
Date : 2020-10-15 14:37 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.brookings.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.brookings.edu)
| andromeduck wrote:
| Hope they don't copy any APIs for comparability because that'd be
| copyright infringement.
| alexgmcm wrote:
| If it's paid for by the people, it should belong to the people.
|
| Open-source meets this requirement, proprietary software doesn't.
| dsabanin wrote:
| It's paid for by the people of United States, but if made Open
| Source in the conventional sense it's going to belong to people
| of all the countries?
|
| People of all the countries are not a problem, but governments
| that are in political opposition to the US can be. I could
| imagine them using the source code to target technological and
| social structures of the country. They could do it now as well,
| but with much more effort than cloning stuff from GitHub.
| jburwell wrote:
| Unless the software is classified, the source code is available
| via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.
| adrianN wrote:
| What's the license for code obtained that way? Is it public
| domain?
| saagarjha wrote:
| Government work in general is in the public domain.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| My understanding is that that only applies to software
| written by government employees. Put more rhetorically: if
| the government pays for Windows (which it does), does that
| mean you can access the Windows source code via FOIA request?
| Dangeranger wrote:
| One problem with this approach is that you need to know about
| the existence of the software in order to craft a FOIA
| request such that you can see the code, this can mean sending
| multiple FOIA requests. Combine that with the delay in
| fulfilling a request, on the order of months, or sometimes
| longer, and you could be looking at a year or more before you
| get the source code you were looking for.
| throwawaygh wrote:
| _> While some FOSS contributors are paid by their employer to
| contribute, most contributions to FOSS are made without direct
| compensation. Therefore, another option is to provide tax credits
| to the people who volunteer their free time to help create and
| maintain FOSS. A bill for such a credit has been introduced in
| the New York State Assembly every legislative session since 2009
| but has never made it out of committee. If passed, this bill
| would provide a $200 tax credit for expenses related to FOSS
| development, which would help incentivize more individuals to
| contribute, likely leading to spillover benefits for the state of
| New York similar to those from the French procurement
| regulation._
|
| It's like Hacktoberfest, but instead of a free t-shirt it's
| $200.00 off your tax bill. What could possibly go wrong?
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Europe is ahead of the curve here, wonder if anything they do
| influenced the Brookings institute to say this.
|
| > This research shows that the passage of such a law in France
| led to as much as an 18% increase in the founding of French IT-
| related startups and as much as a 14% increase in the number of
| French workers employed in IT-related jobs.
|
| Yes it did!
| jqpabc123 wrote:
| Asking for government support is really an admission of failure.
|
| It is an admission that the open source concept cannot survive on
| it's own merit in the marketplace.
|
| It is asking government to pick winners and losers by way of
| funding, instead of the marketplace.
|
| What could possibly go wrong? Everyone knows that government
| lives on the cutting edge of technology and will always respond
| instantly to the open source community --- rather than say
| corporate donors and lobbyists. They would never demand things be
| steered in their direction.
|
| As they say, be careful what you wish for --- you just might get
| it.
| jedbrown wrote:
| Requesting federal funding for interstate highways is really an
| admission of failure.
|
| It is an admission that the transportation infrastructure
| concept cannot survive on its own merit in the marketplace.
| jqpabc123 wrote:
| Yes, absolutely correct.
|
| If the marketplace controlled the interstate highway system,
| every on and off ramp would have a toll booth --- not to
| mention that the roadways would likely receive minimum
| upkeep.
|
| Some things are simply unworkable under the "free market" and
| transportation is one of these --- but software is not.
| jedbrown wrote:
| Clearly there are toll roads and many other forms of
| commercially viable "free market" transportation, so your
| argument is that _some_ forms of transportation demand
| public funding.
|
| The same applies to software: like cheap and versatile
| transportation, libraries and infrastructure are force
| multipliers for commercially-viable and public-interest
| products. Despite such software being heavily used in
| industry, there's a lot that is funded from a combination
| of public sources (e.g., a side-effect of federally-funded
| basic research by groups with deeply-held open source
| convictions) and volunteer effort. This could be improved
| by direct public funding or by tax incentives for companies
| that contribute to independently-governed open source
| projects. Either way, it takes legislators recognizing that
| open source infrastructure has sufficient value to create
| policy that helps sustain it.
| elicash wrote:
| Lots of things couldn't survive on their own, but aren't
| failures at all.
|
| For example, we're currently subsidizing multiple vaccines for
| COVID-19 because it's important that we collectively take on
| the risk that a single one might fail. Those billions in
| spending to pay for something that might be worth $0 is worth
| it because it's likely at least some of the vaccines will be
| safe and effective.
|
| Sometimes things start out as unprofitable and then only later,
| because of those dollars invested, become profitable. Space,
| for example. Government investments in solar power have also
| been super important.
|
| Or, more relevant to Hacker News, how about ARPANET being
| funded by the military, and then later that funding going to
| the National Science Foundation? Eventually, of course, it got
| privatized.
| jqpabc123 wrote:
| COVID-19 is a national emergency, open source is not.
|
| Vaccines easily survive on their own merit in the
| marketplace. Government funding is being used to speed up the
| process and insure redundancy in case of failure.
|
| ARPANET is another questionable comparison.
|
| A world wide, failure proof network had never been done at
| the time so the military subsidized the basic research and
| development. Once the basic R&D was done, the funding ended.
|
| I would be inclined to support new, innovative R&D but I am
| not willing to pay simply to clone existing commercial
| software.
| bluedevil2k wrote:
| The government has shown time and again that it's terrible at
| investing. Most people/entities are when they're spending other
| people's money. This would result in the same issues as all
| government spending does - the powerful Reps and Senators will
| funnel money to open source projects in their districts and to
| their donors. We'll see a lot of open source projects in Kentucky
| get funded because of McConnell. Liberal & Democrat based
| projects will see little funding as Republicans block their
| funding. It would be a mess.
| sethish wrote:
| Debatable. Venture capital in the technology market hasn't
| shown consistent return on investment in terms of revenue.
| Contrawise, the interstate system and the CCC were effective
| government investments.
| thwllms wrote:
| This would be a very big deal in my industry -
| civil/environmental engineering. In the river/stream flood
| modeling space, the US Army Corps of Engineers' HEC-RAS program
| [1] is king. It's a critical part of FEMA's National Flood
| Insurance Program. HEC-RAS is free, but it's not open source, and
| USACE doesn't appear to have any plans to make it so.
|
| HEC-RAS is a Windows-only GUI application. Supposedly USACE has
| an internal Linux version, not publicly available. HEC-RAS has a
| limited COM API, but it's not officially documented. I suspect
| that the API was exposed unintentionally. Most of the input files
| are text, but the format is very strange (very old-school), again
| with no official documentation. I spend much of my days reverse-
| engineering HEC-RAS file formats in order to make the process of
| building flood models more efficient and less error-prone. Other
| developers like me exist at competing civil engineering firms,
| working on similar reverse engineering projects and secret sauce
| tools for HEC-RAS.
|
| If HEC-RAS was made open source, it would be a game changer. We'd
| be able to accomplish so much more. If the input/output files
| were officially documented, it would be a game changer. FEMA
| would benefit tremendously.
|
| [1] https://www.hec.usace.army.mil/software/hec-ras/
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| Fwiw DARPA is already investing in FOSS:
|
| https://www.darpa.mil/program/posh-open-source-hardware
|
| https://www.darpa.mil/opencatalog
| autocorr wrote:
| I think we should have an National Science Foundation level
| federal institution for free software. Stallman advocated for
| this early on I think. The NSF funds fundamental research to the
| benefit of all (setting aside the issue of pay-walled
| journals...). Anyone can apply for a grant to fund research, and
| in fact this is how "soft money" researchers who are not tenure-
| track professors fund their salaries. Using the academic
| community as an anchor for a free software equivalent to the NSF
| would also solve the problem that academics have no incentive to
| develop or maintain software.
| jokull wrote:
| Big movement in Iceland on this. Ministry of Finance has multiple
| teams working in a shared codebase that is open on github, that
| is supposed to be a shared repository to aggregate the whole gov
| user experience in one place (island.is). Another example; I'm
| using an NLP library (Greynir) that was recently MIT licensed
| because of Icelandic government grants (was previously on a less
| liberal, but still open license).
|
| See https://github.com/island-is/island.is
| dimmke wrote:
| For what it's worth, there is a lot of movement in the Federal
| government to open source code that is written for the
| government. The GSA, which is the kind of meta agency that helps
| other federal agencies do stuff talks a lot about this. They also
| have a site called https://code.gov/ that lists open source
| projects created for the Federal government. A lot of their own
| repositories are completely open source and they do development
| in the open.
|
| I work on a contract for the CDC and we open sourced an older
| version of the software we display data on maps in:
| https://github.com/CDCgov/CDC-Maps
|
| I'm working on switching our development to open so we use the
| same codebase that is available to everybody and adding other
| visualizations. It's slow going but there is movement there. I do
| agree it would be beneficial to fund open source projects, likely
| by including some requirement in contracts.
|
| I think them funding projects directly with cash could cause a
| lot of problems though. The increase regulations that would need
| to be added would probably not be worth it for open source
| projects. People who get funding would likely need to submit a
| lot of documentation, there'd also probably be weird rules about
| non U.S. citizens etc... and laws would need to be passed.
| kfrzcode wrote:
| The work we do for the VA is open source! I am a contractor
| working alongside the US Digital Service - there are a TON of
| projects out in the wild and lots of movement in the
| "Government should build open source software" direction.
|
| https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs
|
| Join us at https://oddball.io/jobs
| jhardy54 wrote:
| Big +1.
|
| I found a small bug in a GSA site (plainlanguage.gov) and was
| able to PR a fix that was merged almost immediately. It's a
| shame that we can't do the same with all of the bugs in other
| government websites.
| [deleted]
| gunsch wrote:
| I work on a contract for the VA, which includes open-source
| repos [1] for VA.gov's frontend + backend systems. We work
| closely with USDS [2], who has been a huge ally in advocating
| for doing our work in the open, including our project
| management. It seems like GSA does a lot of similar advocacy
| work, though I haven't interfaced with them directly.
|
| One interesting thing we've run across is that Public Domain
| source code is not considered "Open Source" in terms of OSI
| licensing [3]. This isn't usually relevant, but has blocked use
| cases like software services offering free use for OSI-licensed
| projects.
|
| (To other readers: If you're interested in chatting about
| working on modern, open-source projects in the federal space,
| drop me a note! Email in profile).
|
| [1] https://department-of-veterans-affairs.github.io/va.gov-
| team..., repository links at the bottom
|
| [2] https://www.usds.gov/
|
| [3] https://opensource.org/node/878
| dalbasal wrote:
| Say, for the sake of argument, that you had $100m pa to invest
| in open source. What/how would you do?
| godelski wrote:
| For what it's worth a large amount of the DOE work (where they
| have the super computers) is open source. You got ORNL (with
| Summit and soon Frontier)[0], ANL[1] (soon to have Aurora), and
| LLNL[2]. I think what needs to happen is that things could be
| better organized, for example ORNL has [3] which still open
| sourced but not grouped under the ORNL GH. Also if we got to
| code.gov and search "ORNL" and "C++" we only see DCA++ which
| isn't on the GH but here[4].
|
| I think as long as code isn't sensitive to national security
| (LLNL...) it should be open source. But I think the big problem
| is that organization and discovery is very difficult. code.gov
| is an attempt to solve this, but it doesn't do it well.
|
| [0] https://github.com/ORNL
|
| [1] https://github.com/argonne-national-laboratory
|
| [2] https://github.com/LLNL
|
| [3] https://github.com/ornladios/ADIOS2
|
| [4] https://github.com/CompFUSE/DCA
| rwcarlsen wrote:
| And I'll add Idaho National Lab [5] to that list -
| particularly the MOOSE multiphysics finite element code [6]
| is a largish project with significant momentum/funding:
|
| [5] https://github.com/idaholab/
|
| [6] https://github.com/idaholab/moose
| ssully wrote:
| I'll add Pacific Northwest National Lab (PNNL) [7]
|
| [7]: https://github.com/pnnl
| xxpor wrote:
| The funny part about a lot of the national security code at
| LLNL is that I bet there is approximately no one else on the
| planet with the computing resources to actually run it (HPC
| simulations of weapon effects) Except the few countries that
| possibility could are exactly the ones we wouldn't want to
| get their hands on it... funny how that works out.
|
| Just remember, what was the actual reason ENIAC was created?
| It wasn't just for fun:
|
| >its first program was a study of the feasibility of the
| thermonuclear weapon.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC
| kobe_bryant wrote:
| yup, I'm working on a contract for HRSA and open source is a
| requirement
| mtalantikite wrote:
| It's definitely becoming more common. Many agencies have
| organizations up on GitHub where development of various
| products are done out in the open (for example,
| https://github.com/cmsgov).
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| > I think them funding projects directly with cash could cause
| a lot of problems though. The increase regulations that would
| need to be added would probably not be worth it for open source
| projects. People who get funding would likely need to submit a
| lot of documentation, there'd also probably be weird rules
| about non U.S. citizens etc... and laws would need to be
| passed.
|
| I think 18F's modular contracting methodology is highly
| effective for this sort endeavor, if you can take the opinion
| that they're the sponsor and benevolent dictator driving that
| part of the codebase (and the code developed is open sourced
| upon confirmation acceptance criteria has been met).
|
| Thank you for switching to an open development model. A rising
| tide lifts all boats.
|
| https://18f.gsa.gov/2019/04/09/why-we-love-modular-contracti...
| dimmke wrote:
| Nice link, I've followed 18F a little and I'm interested in
| everything they're doing.
|
| I think whipping contractors into shape is the easiest path
| to increasing government participation in open source. It's
| easier than coming up with new regulations specifically
| around open source funding.
|
| Billions of dollars are spent each year by the federal
| government on custom software development anyways. And on the
| whole, they end up spending about what big tech companies do
| for engineers (but not getting the same level of quality)
| Forcing the contractors to be more open will probably keep
| them more honest and make them write less shitty code.
| jrumbut wrote:
| I think the contracting model (which has it's place!) is
| really at the root of the problem. The time for contractors
| is when you need something that is very rare in the world
| or you need a large temporary expansion of capacity.
|
| A lot of government contracts are the kind of work that
| will be consistently taking place over decades and can be
| done by any of hundreds of thousands of similarly competent
| people. Imagine if you didn't even need to write a
| contract, didn't need a bidding process, that could be
| substantial time and money saved on its own.
|
| Then with FTEs minor initiatives like finding interesting
| internal libraries to open source can just happen. What I'm
| saying isn't a new idea (really it's an old idea) and I
| very much admire those who are actually taking the risk to
| make this kind of thing happen because the failures can be
| very visible and successes sometimes aren't.
| [deleted]
| an_opabinia wrote:
| Brookings seems to be advocating funding open source IT
| projects that already exist, for example a big ($10m+) check to
| the Apache Foundation. Apache already has the compliance
| competency.
|
| It may be more efficient to use existing grant writing for
| universities. The Apache Foundation can redistribute the money
| it can't hire programmers competently the way a university
| research department can. However it would be bigger impact to
| write smaller checks for many tools.
|
| The real problem is that single purpose / single feature IT
| software tends to be the best at what it does but is the
| hardest to fund this way.
|
| The compromise will probably be funding people to write and
| evangelize standards. This is too bad, because people who apply
| for grants aren't Google, they aren't standardizing an
| existing, widely deployed real piece of successful engineering
| without any economics brakes. They're people writing things
| like SOC 2 or ISO 27000xxx that arguably do not provide any
| meaningful value at all - standards that could vanish overnight
| and absolutely nothing about a single person's daily life would
| change at all.
|
| 18F or whatever publishes a lot of stuff like this. Markdown
| policy documents. I think it's profoundly wasteful, it is
| taking talented people's intellectual energy and diverting it
| to something that not only hardly anyone will use, but
| perpetuates the worst aspects of government - the belief that
| text and bureaucracy and the way lawyers do things is
| intrinsically valuable, as opposed to something normal people
| routinely completely and utterly ignore.
| sethish wrote:
| I'm not sure who I would trust, but I don't generally trust
| university research departments to produce high quality,
| reusable software. Not that industry projects produce
| consistent quality software either, but fewer of those
| projects are open sourced.
| peterwoerner wrote:
| Sure, but there is no reward for research departments to
| produce high quality code. Their job is to experiment and
| publish, maintainable bug free(unless it effects their
| code) doesn't get rewarded.
|
| With that being said there are tons of high quality open
| source scientific computing projects e.g. lammps, abinit,
| dakota, Deal.II which are open source, ran by people at
| government research labs and universities and funded by
| e.g. NSF which work really nicely and are (I assume)
| quality software products. I will note that the Europeans
| seem to be better and producing these kinds of works than
| the Yankees.
| sitkack wrote:
| One wants to get something that is worthwhile, of course.
| It would be fairly easy to vet existing projects and
| codebases for their quality at a high level. Mostly at a
| binary level, with the goal to weed out total junk.
|
| Like a license, I think it would be nice if projects
| adopted a development guideline, code formatting, the
| commit, code review, merge process, etc. So that everyone
| can have a common set of known operating norms around how
| that project is developed. It would be a lot easier for a
| funding organization to review if that were in place. The
| Robert's Rules of Code Review. Bonus points if this were
| all encapsulated into an automatic process.
|
| I think there is a ton of value in funding projects
| (Apache,Rust,Blender,etc) as well as individuals. It
| would be wonderful if someone could go on sabbatical,
| full or part time and get paid to work on OSS. Maybe you
| apply for a grant, show them the git repos (process above
| analyzes), one has a plan (fix bugs, new features,
| evangelism, tPM, etc) for the time and with time with the
| bare minimum of goals. Like an agent can watch your
| activity log and do a roll-up.
|
| I think 50k a year would be a number that many technical
| folks making much much more would jump at the chance to
| just work on OSS.
| acdha wrote:
| > Sure, but there is no reward for research departments
| to produce high quality code. Their job is to experiment
| and publish, maintainable bug free(unless it effects
| their code) doesn't get rewarded.
|
| This isn't completely true. I'm familiar with at least
| few projects which got grants specifically to build tools
| for other scientists and those were great for funding
| general software engineering jobs not tied to the usual
| academic publication/job cycle. That was good for
| supporting ongoing upgrades -- nobody gets a publication
| for upgrading a dependency, which is how you end up with
| someone keeping a Windows 95 box on life support for
| years because they were focused on science - and also for
| supporting things like good documentation since that's a
| serious time commitment.
|
| It'd be an idea to scale up things like that for
| identified high-impact projects, with the trick being
| finding someone capable of overseeing software
| engineering rather than the usual academic focus of
| existing grant panels. Seems like something which might
| be a fit under the Commerce department since there's a
| lot of stuff which American businesses benefit from but
| generally do not directly support.
| peterwoerner wrote:
| You're a right, it isn't completely thankless. And it was
| suggested to me as a great way to increase citations was
| to write my algorithm to work in LAMMPs. Nevertheless, I
| looked at the risk-reward (and also considered the
| algorithm I was working on worthless and decided to
| punt).
| acdha wrote:
| Oh, I completely agree. The projects I saw were
| considered novel for actually getting funding for staff
| engineering positions which didn't follow the regular
| academic track. They had to do that to get the right
| people since the grad students were heavily incentivized
| to focus on things which would get noteworthy
| publications and you couldn't get experienced software
| engineers on the academic pay scale unless you hit the
| unicorn of someone who was really interested in the
| domain and didn't like money.
| ska wrote:
| There is plausibly an easy enough solution for this, if the
| grant structure allows/encourages departments hiring
| developers to help with this. If your primary source of
| labor for this is short term grad students with no
| expertise in software development, and not training
| mechanism, the results are predictable.
|
| Another thing that works against this is a lack of academic
| credit for doing,overseeing, or steering the work. This
| also could change.
|
| Changing the incentives can easily change the results.
| TimSchumann wrote:
| While I agree with your, let's call them reservations,
| about the quality of said software written by scientists
| who are not professional software engineers -- I still
| believe it would be a net benefit to the world if Congress
| tied all federally funded research dollars to an open
| source license, up to and including disclosure on hardware
| specifications and firmware source code.
|
| I've got a friend on the data science/visibility team at
| CERN, and she has some fun stories. It's absurd to me that
| the reproducibility path for so much modern day research in
| nearly every field passes through proprietary closed source
| software, proprietary pre-compiled signed binaries, ditto
| for firmware, and then (sometimes) hardware where the
| entirety of the documentation consists of 'A service
| contract with the vendor'.
|
| The reproducibility crisis in the sciences right now is
| essentially an excess of inputs and deficit of testing
| those inputs -- closed source hardware/software is not
| helping.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Look up https://nlnet.nl/ they demux big EU grants to small
| projects that aren't well equipped to apply on their own.
|
| It has been solving the problem you mention very well.
| nickpinkston wrote:
| This is the infrastructure investment I'm about!
|
| I want to see Biden / Congress cutting the ribbon on a
| datacenter, quantum computing lab, or something.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| This is an interesting point.
|
| If congress invests in open source, it subsidizes all software
| development for the world.
|
| If congress invests in software from companies (like MS or
| Amazon), it subsidizes software development for these U.S.
| companies to compete on the global stage.
|
| I can see the first case being in the best interest of humanity,
| and the second case being in the best interest of the U.S.
|
| What would you do?
| [deleted]
| Communitivity wrote:
| A huge move would be to standardize on Mastodon instead of Teams,
| and invest in making Mastodon secure enough for FOUO work.
| duskwuff wrote:
| Huh? Microsoft Teams is a centralized real-time text/video chat
| service, not a federated microblogging service like Mastodon.
| They aren't even remotely similar.
| danschumann wrote:
| Congress should write laws which are like open source software.
|
| Branches.. revisions.. being ran through a legal interpreter to
| ensure there are no logical errors.
|
| There is a movement for plain english bills, which the average
| user(citizen) could read. I'm for that too.
| ddingus wrote:
| Can you imagine a parser from the near future?
|
| SB 1101
|
| Legislation failed self consistency checks against:
|
| HB 1203, SB 32
|
| Renders sections in statute redundant:
|
| 33.401, section A 31.22, section D
|
| Renders sections in statute moot:
|
| 31.101, all sections. 32.4, section B
|
| Gaps in enforcement found (loop holes)
|
| SB 1101 Section A, has incomplete coverage of peoples...
| anticensor wrote:
| Sections from other statutes that would make obeying this
| statute punishable:
|
| HB 7075
| ddingus wrote:
| Exactly!
| saagarjha wrote:
| Just push it anyways, SB 32 is always flaky...
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > Branches.. revisions..
|
| That's the normal law creation workflow (nearly everywhere, for
| a century or so already). They don't use automated tools, but
| the features are there.
| lmeyerov wrote:
| I've been a proponent of something here for awhile. For context,
| currently, gov requires something like 1% of budget to go to
| 'small' business (where small is < 500 employees!). Doing 1% to
| OSS would be huge, and get around the problem of NSF/NIH/etc.
| having to fund novel research but largely failing at common data
| infra.
|
| The main sticking point I struggled with here is around beltway
| contractors. They already largely prevent good software from
| making it into gov. Today, they prefer to write their own crap or
| live on OSS without really giving back. Most proposals I thought
| about here would result in beltway bandits getting the OSS
| contracts without doing real passthrough to the actual devs.
| They're the ones with the contract relationships and can tell
| funders their OSS value-add layer is the part needing funding to
| make it gov-ready. Most folks in this community are nice as
| individuals, but due to the lengthy & uphill nature of pushing a
| contract through, they've locked down the system, and it'd take a
| tight policy & strong org to work around them. I'm not a fan of
| Linux Foundation, Apache, etc. as financial stewards either, so
| it's tough.
| [deleted]
| snarfy wrote:
| There is really no reason at all that any government database
| should be a commercial database. I'm looking squarely at you,
| Oracle.
| StillBored wrote:
| I think I'm going to disagree with the sentiment of the article
| and say that congress should not be investing in opensource
| generically any more than they should be building cars,
| computers, or whatever other shared technologies we all use
| (except maybe to boost some really fundamental research, AKA
| Sematech).
|
| But that isn't to say, that congress shouldn't be allocating
| budget to open source projects where it makes sense. Another
| poster pointed out the education software market, which is a good
| example of a case where the government is basically creating a
| whole industry that exists primary to service a government need.
| In that case there should be a strong bias to libre licensed
| software, even going so far as to create it if needed.
|
| Blanket statements though, about all software the government uses
| should be free is crazy. Why can't the government actually do
| cost/benefit analysis and make that determination on a case by
| case basis and pick the tool for the job. It would be crazy to
| say that they should write their own internet search engine, or
| niche software for the two guys in the government that use
| $commercial_off_the_shelf_package that only runs on windows.
|
| So, why not identify a few places that need change and fix those
| rather than these all encompassing statements. Tax filing
| software is another area where anyone who isn't h&r block or
| Intuit thinks the government should actually spend a few million
| and write some software, or for that matter voting software.
|
| PS, in case it wasn't clear, if the government writes some
| software is should absolutely be opensource with a liberal
| license.
| Proven wrote:
| No, it shouldn't.
|
| It's a call for handouts for OSS.
| tpoacher wrote:
| No, they should invest in _FREE_ (libre) software. There is a
| difference.
| otterley wrote:
| Don't we already do this via National Science Foundation (NSF)
| grants? A lot of open source has come out of them. If you look at
| academic papers associated with the source, you'll often see NSF
| grant numbers.
| code-faster wrote:
| Can't we setup a school Today that does R&D in open source tech
| and apply for research grants?
| yalogin wrote:
| If anything it should be the law that all federal software should
| be open sourced. This is after all created with the people's
| money. Companies that write it get money to write it but should
| ultimately belong to the people. We all know its never going to
| happen though.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| I think this would backfire. The cash cow contracts will be
| viciously defended, and OSS will invariably be labelled
| "socialist" or "communist" (at it is socialist at a fundamental
| level).
|
| Essentially it will politicize it, probably to a degree it has
| not been publicly subjected to.
|
| And OSS has little to no professional PR to defend it, at least
| in relation to the vendors that will employ armies of PR flacks.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| That might have been a problem 10-20 years ago, but I'm quite
| willing to take the risk and win big today.
|
| Remember we need something like this to counter the "breaking
| up FAANG is bad for national security" narrative.
| WalterBright wrote:
| The open source software community is doing just fine. Having the
| government step in will likely change its nature, and not for the
| better.
| imglorp wrote:
| I think one piece in federal scope would be school courseware.
| How many poor schools fork out for something to do forums,
| grades, homework submission, lesson notes. There's a ton of
| duplication and there's no point. Get one decent cloud
| implementation, host it, and scale for several million users.
| Then give all schools and students free access.
|
| It's no-brainer infrastructure, like highways.
| throwawaygh wrote:
| Moodle is GPL. The expensive part is training, not the license
| fees. Lots of teachers really need extreme amounts of hand-
| holding, even younger ones who have been using websites for
| their entire lives. (And you can replace "teacher" there with
| any other profession, including "programmer".)
| imglorp wrote:
| And hosting, and support?
| throwawaygh wrote:
| Sure, but training (and, I guess, support, but in the
| "helping users" sense not in the "installing
| patches/upgrades" sense) is the _vast_ majority of the
| expense.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| This is just an indication that the design and concepts of
| Moodle do not match the mental model commonly used by
| teachers.
| throwawaygh wrote:
| I guess that further bolsters the point that FOSS isn't a
| cure-all for ed tech. A for-profit company that can reduce
| training costs by half would be much cheaper than a FOSS
| solution that requires more training.
|
| Training is expensive.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| FOSS movement is dominated by geeks. Fine with me, I am
| one as well. But the relative dearth of artists and UX
| designers results in very well written software that
| users struggle to use.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Let's call it clearly, all educational software is badly
| designed. Moodle is no exception. It's not only different
| from the teachers mental model, it's also different from
| the students mental models, and administrators mental
| models, besides it imposes complex and low productivity
| workflows.
|
| The newer proprietary educational portals are usually
| designed after Moodle, so it's not only bad, it's also
| trend setting. The good news is that this means they are
| better than the old ones from before people had something
| to copy.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| I disagree. I use Canvas to teach, and while I could
| write a 100 bug reports, I wouldn't classify it as badly
| designed. There are many features I do want, and I hope
| they get implemented at some point, but it's definitely
| over the threshold of good software.
| kissickas wrote:
| As a student on Canvas this year and Sakai last year (and
| Blackboard before that), I can tell you that Canvas is
| atrocious and easily the worst of the bunch.
|
| Just so I'm not making an empty comment, here are a few
| quick complaints:
|
| - Confusing differences between calendar vs module views
| that differ from class to class depending on where the
| professor tries to put things
|
| - Zoom is shunned to its own tab rather than integrated
| with the calendar, causing students to constantly ask
| each other for the password for every session
|
| - Everything (tests, midterms, homework assignments) is
| called a quiz, and it's often unclear what is going to be
| graded or what allows multiple submissions until it's too
| late
|
| - Notification settings are terrible and most people
| stick with the settings they set in the first week,
| meaning some of my classmates are just now realizing
| they've been missing announcements or grade postings
|
| - If I get an email that a teacher has released grades, I
| have to go to Canvas to open it - and sometimes it's not
| even true
|
| - Notification counts are ignored because they appear
| even on things I've already seen but just not clicked on
| from the "home" view
|
| - Replies to my own discussion posts are mixed in with
| replies to everyone else's posts, meaning no real
| discussion is had
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| Interesting.
|
| > - Confusing differences between calendar vs module
| views that differ from class to class depending on where
| the professor tries to put things
|
| This is actually a feature, not a bug. Courses are wildly
| different, professors think wildly different. I would not
| want the software to shoehorn everyone into the same
| schematic. After all, in-person courses are organized in
| wildly different ways. You just have learn and
| communicate.
|
| > Zoom is shunned to its own tab rather than integrated
| with the calendar, causing students to constantly ask
| each other for the password for every session
|
| That is a misconfiguration on your uni/prof's part. If
| they do it right, every calendar entry should a zoom link
| with the password included, resulting in one-click
| joining of class.
|
| > Everything (tests, midterms, homework assignments) is
| called a quiz, and it's often unclear what is going to be
| graded or what allows multiple submissions until it's too
| late
|
| Are we using the same software? If you click on any
| assignment it clearly shows every one of these things at
| the top. I just checked in student view.
|
| -- I completely agree with your comments about
| notification settings. Also, the email system within
| Canvas is atrocious.
| kissickas wrote:
| The calendar entries for the professors who use the
| Canvas Zoom feature don't have Zoom links (I assume it
| should be in the location?) - the only classes in my
| schedule that have working Zoom links have them
| copy/pasted into the event description, where the
| password has been embedded in the link.
|
| And this is what I see at the top of two of my next
| submissions:
|
| Due Monday by 11pm / Points 30 / Submitting: a file
| upload / File Types: pdf, doc, and docx / Available until
| Oct 20 at 12pm
|
| Due No due date / Points 1 / Questions 1 / Time Limit
| None
|
| Neither says how many attempts I have. I believe the file
| upload has unlimited re-uploads and the latter only
| allows for one submission, but I really have no idea how
| to confirm that without risking it.
| jedbrown wrote:
| I'm a professor. Our department has run its own Moodle
| for years, despite the university switching to Canvas.
| The university has exerted lots of pressure and this is
| the first semester in which all classes are primarily on
| Canvas. There has been no end to complaints about
| pedagogy that isn't expressible in Canvas, resulting in
| bad compromises or huge amounts of labor for large
| classes.
|
| Bottom line: if universities could contract for support
| and pay developers a fraction of what they currently pay
| for proprietary LMS, Moodle (or another open source
| platform currently starved for resources) would have much
| better usability and student data wouldn't be in the
| hands of private equity firms.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| I'm not saying that yours is a bad idea, but the lobby for
| companies who make the existing software in that space would
| likely disagree with that position.
| DesiLurker wrote:
| wasnt there a similar effort to convert all govt docs to the
| ODF or something like that. IIRC it was met with an
| overwhelming opposition from MSFT.
| sitkack wrote:
| I too was involved in OSS wrt Government in the early 2000s
| and Office file formats were a huge moat that prevented a
| lot of adoption of OSS within government.
|
| MS did a really good job of pushing off web technologies as
| threat to their platform. We are only now getting to where
| we should have been. Netscape was way too naive and MS saw
| two or three steps ahead and blocked their move.
| ddingus wrote:
| Big time.
|
| In the 00's I was part of an effort to merely get the State
| government to consider OSS.
|
| The lobby was powerful and effective.
|
| Despite broad bipartisan support (we did a great job
| educating legislators on open software and open data and how
| that resonates with the work of the public) our house speaker
| blocked it solid.
|
| Had there been a vote, it would have passed.
|
| Tons of people lobbied that speaker for literally months.
| Fax, phone calls, visits to her office, the works.
|
| 4 guys in expensive, black suits, and some number of zeroes
| to the right of a donation got it done.
|
| For what it's worth, the same group was successful in part of
| removing that speaker from office.
|
| The damage had been done. It was hard to even bring the
| matter up in committee going forward.
| dustingetz wrote:
| Why bother to build awesome free software that works when you can
| charge 8, 9, 10 figures and deliver nothing
| swlkr wrote:
| I'm biased seeing as I'm a software engineer, but this is
| actually a great idea. It could provide much needed competition
| to expensive gov contractors creating proprietary software.
| oxymoran wrote:
| Congress would have to know what open source software was first.
|
| Also the problem that Congress is in the pockets of these tech
| monoliths.
| KoftaBob wrote:
| The federal government has ramped up that exact goal with the
| launch of the US Digital Service:
|
| https://www.usds.gov/ https://digital.gov/
| untog wrote:
| The government should _make_ open-source software, paying
| developers handsomely to do so.
|
| I know I live in cloud-cuckoo fantasy land here, but I know
| plenty of developers that would love to work on projects for the
| civic good, but they don't because they also want to earn good
| money so that they can live comfortably, raise a family easily,
| etc. etc. So they go and work for Facebook and Google, etc.
|
| There's an inbuilt assumption that government can't or shouldn't
| ever compete with tech giants for salary. But look at the
| incredible sums of money wasted on contracts with borderline
| useless consulting shops. You can't tell me that money wouldn't
| be better spent on hiring smart developers and project managers
| and just _getting stuff done_.
|
| I know it'll never happen, but a developer can dream. There's no
| actual reason why it couldn't.
| zapita wrote:
| For what it's worth I agree 100% with you.
| jeffbee wrote:
| There are USDS and 18F, that were initially populated with ex-
| Googbooksoftlix engineers. Of course, everyone with a brain
| left USDS after Trump was elected.
|
| https://medium.com/the-u-s-digital-service/youll-never-be-th...
|
| https://www.fastcompany.com/40528581/obama-federal-it-fix-it...
| hanniabu wrote:
| That's the ideal situation, but anybody that has worked in the
| public sector can tell you the outcome. You'd have an office
| full of incompetent people that are making $150k/yr just
| because they're a friend or relative of someone. That's a
| really big problem in government and there's no simple solution
| here. Even if you started doing background checks and not
| allowing partners/relatives of current employees to be hired,
| they would just get picked up as favors by other districts. A
| sort of friend hiring exchange program if you will.
| untog wrote:
| It's not like that doesn't happen in the private sector as
| well, though. Literally can't count the number of top execs
| you see parachuted into top jobs because they're friends with
| the CEO.
| nhkcode wrote:
| How does the licensing work? According to the GPL FAQ[1] code
| written by government employees is public domain and can't be
| licensed with the GPL. I'd imagine similar restrictions would
| apply to other copyleft licenses.
|
| [1] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLUSGov
| thinkmassive wrote:
| Most code written for government use is not written by
| government employees, but by contractors. Here's the second
| paragraph from the section you linked:
|
| "However, when a US federal government agency uses contractors
| to develop software, that is a different situation. The
| contract can require the contractor to release it under the GNU
| GPL. (GNU Ada was developed in this way.) Or the contract can
| assign the copyright to the government agency, which can then
| release the software under the GNU GPL."
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Indeed, I once did some work for the Library of Congress. Despite
| all of it being developed and served on Linux, I was forced to
| boot a Windows VM to connect to their VPN and work through it.
|
| Who's the "cancer" now?
| DoofusOfDeath wrote:
| I don't have hard statistics to back this up, but my impression
| is that Congress has a habit of adding strings and restrictions
| on whatever they fund.
|
| I would hesitate to accept that Faustian bargain.
| eximius wrote:
| Accessibility would probably be the biggest difficulty that
| might be legally required through poorly interacting laws.
|
| (Not to say that things shouldn't be accessible, but we've
| already seen good-will gestures ruined because of this case.
| Some university posts lectures online to be nice, forced to
| take them down because they aren't accessible.)
| tehjoker wrote:
| If they're giving you money, you have the space and ability
| to do it. I don't see the problem here.
| mtalantikite wrote:
| The federal government has a requirement by law (called
| Section 508) that requires agencies to provide people with
| disabilities equal access to electronic information and data.
| Agencies have teams whose sole job is to evaluate any
| software that is built or deployed meets accessibility
| standards.
| umutisik wrote:
| Also worth considering is open source software grants for
| academics. This would increase the number of people in academia
| who are major contributors to open source projects. Added benefit
| would be that, as practicing software engineers, those people
| would be good at teaching software engineering to their students.
| sitkack wrote:
| I love this idea.
|
| There are already processes and procedures in place, it piggy
| backs on a lot of existing relationships. NSF?
| diego_moita wrote:
| For a non-American, it is amusing to see Americans believing that
| their Congress are the people's servants.
|
| Unlike other developed democracies, the U.S. is a country where
| bribing the Congress is actually legalized, in the form of
| campaign donations. In fact, the main work of most congresspeople
| is to run after money to finance their next campaign. Therefore
| they will serve primarily the ones that pay them, not the ones
| that elect them.
|
| When open source bribes politicians then they'll pay attention.
| jcranmer wrote:
| > Unlike other developed democracies, the U.S. is a country
| where bribing the Congress is actually legalized, in the form
| of campaign donations.
|
| That's not remotely true. It is illegal to actually give any
| gifts to any government official (including elected officials).
| This extends in practical effect to "we have to charge the DoE
| for coffee when they're doing a site visit."
|
| You can donate to political campaigns--just as you can in every
| democratic country I'm aware of. Candidates can solicit
| donations--just as they can in every democratic country I'm
| aware of. What's atypical in the US is that the party structure
| is incredibly weak (which means you get less relative funding
| from party sources, and therefore candidates have to get more
| funding from fundraising), and elections are so eye-wateringly
| expensive that you _need_ to spend more time fundraising to be
| competitive.
| marketingPro wrote:
| https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/top-
| spenders?cy...
|
| If you get caught up in details, you won't be able to
| understand.
| sitkack wrote:
| Those numbers are incredulous!
| curtis3389 wrote:
| You should ask yourself: how can a for-profit company
| like AT&T justify spending $16million on something with
| $0 ROI?
| asdfadsfgfdda wrote:
| For a company that made $180 billion in revenue, $16
| million is only .009%. I'm not denying that lobbying is
| effective, but there's clearly a limit.
|
| There are probably thousands of individual government
| regulations that each could cost AT&T more than $16
| million per year. If lobbying was as powerful as some
| think, why don't they lobby even more?
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| Those numbers are just what they're spending on staff doing
| lobbying around the country, right? Most of those don't
| seem too crazy. Like the AARP is spending $3 million, but
| how many lobbyists is that actually employing? 10?
| Siira wrote:
| As someone who doesn't live in the US, I should tell people
| here that legalizing "bad" actions can be a net good. The
| lobbying market is big, and you can't extinguish it; You can
| only make it a black market. This makes the laws more suited to
| the interests of "shady elites." Consider that Google serves
| the whole world a very valuable service; What do the corrupt
| beneficiaries of most other countries do? They have near zero
| output.
| notherthrowaway wrote:
| Lobbying as "too big to fail" is an interesting argument,
| although your "black market" argument could be made for
| pretty much any law. On the other hand, we know that
| legislation and court decisions have a large impact because
| we've witnessed the results of McCain/Feingold and Citizens
| United. At the same time, we can observe how other
| democracies manage the same issue.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| "black market" argument could be made for pretty much any
| law
|
| Not the OP, but ... murder or genocide is very clearly a
| crime, while lobbying starts with "talking to an elected
| official about laws that concern you", which is sorta
| normal in democracy, the elected officials should be
| available to talk. It only becomes problematic if it is
| overdone or done too secretively.
|
| I think that a good and transparent lobby register is
| probably more useful than outright ban; at least an
| external observer can glean some information from it.
| notherthrowaway wrote:
| We have made murder illegal and there is a "murder for
| hire" black market. How does that refute my point?
| a1369209993 wrote:
| > while lobbying starts with "talking to an elected
| official about laws that concern you"
|
| For the purposes of discussing government corruption,
| "lobbying" mean "talking to an elected official about
| laws that concern you, _with the implication that their
| response will affect how much and in what direction you
| use money to pervert the electoral process_ ".
| (Obviously, corporations generally don't actually
| explicitly _say_ that part, because plausible
| deniablity.)
| craftinator wrote:
| What you describe is more the contrapositive of 'legalizing
| "bad" actions can be a net good.', in that it's "illegalizing
| 'bad' actions can be a net bad".
|
| Lobbying is already legal, and is mostly a bad action; but if
| we make it illegal, it will create a black market that isn't
| regulated. It's the same problem (one of many) that the "War
| on Drugs" had, in that any activity that's illegal tends to
| be unregulatable. It also attracts to the market for people
| who are already doing illegal things.
|
| I think the root of the problem is that politics in the US
| (and in most other places) is a popularity contest; it
| attracts people who are charming, lie effectively, and who's
| goal is to be popular. They, of course, have other goals too,
| but having the accolades of the represented is a requirement,
| and people that seek that status end up drawn towards
| politics.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Yes and that doesn't mean that legalizing it carte blanche is
| a net good either. There are important pieces of legislation
| missing around controlling how and when politician's can
| fundraise. Most normal countries legalize lobbying & restrict
| electioneering to a ~3 month window prior to an election.
| Additionally, they usually line up election cycles so that
| you're only having an election every 4 years on all parts of
| government.
|
| America has no such restrictions. Members of Congress & the
| President start running & fundraising now ~2 years before an
| election (& unofficially before that). For the House of
| Representatives, that means members are in an electioneering
| & fundraising mode non-stop. The staggered election cycle in
| the Senate means that a large portion of the Senate is
| constantly campaigning further making focusing on the act of
| governing difficult. Fixing these issues doesn't solve all
| problems obviously but making no reforms isn't going to
| improve things either.
| Siira wrote:
| I agree.
| xondono wrote:
| As a european, to me it's amazing the amount of disinformation
| we've been fed about how the US works.
|
| Spend enough time in both continents and you'll see that the
| proposition that the US is somehow more corrupt is not only
| disingenuous, it's also probably dead wrong.
| unishark wrote:
| Just to be clear about the law, there is a limit of a couple
| thousand bucks on campaign donations under the federal election
| campaign act.
|
| The issue is under the first amendment, the government is not
| allowed to curb speech by people or organizations advocating
| for a candidate as a third party (which people can contribute
| to instead).
| xrd wrote:
| If I could donate all my karma points to you for this single
| comment, I would.
| shuntress wrote:
| Campaign finance transparency is a complex problem.
|
| Of course, having a president who equates civil fines for late
| paperwork with criminal prosecution for dispensing hush money
| as equally benign "process crimes" is a major problem as well.
| tyler2 wrote:
| This won't work. It will create another layer of grant writing
| bureaucrats that shovel the money towards their favorites and
| cash in on the process.
|
| Corporate money already has a bad influence on software freedom.
| This will be worse.
|
| What _would_ work is UBI, so persons who are willing to live
| frugally for a couple of years can create software, no strings
| attached.
| R0b0t1 wrote:
| This sounds good as a soundbite, but how? Knowing how federal
| bidding works in general I can't imagine the funds being used
| constructively, it would end up as some kind of popularity
| contest.
| sidlls wrote:
| FOSS is already to some extent a popularity contest.
| dTal wrote:
| Is that any different than any other "government funds X"
| proposal? If this is a consistent problem, then government is
| just plain broken. Which is of course a problem, but an
| orthogonal one to software funding specifically.
| johnmaguire2013 wrote:
| The article mentions three ideas for how:
|
| > All three of these levers for FOSS--direct funding,
| procurement regulation, and tax incentives--should be included
| in the next infrastructure bill.
| ebiester wrote:
| You could run it like NSF grants.
|
| https://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_list.jsp?org=nsf&ord=rcnt
|
| Put 10 million a year for 5 years as an experiment. It takes an
| extra administrator and some part time experts in the field who
| are compensated for the work.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Money will likely to go those who employ people who are good at
| writing convincing grant applications. 'Twas ever thus.
| andi999 wrote:
| I read once that software created out of public funded projects
| in the US was public domain, is this actually true?
| nine_k wrote:
| I would suggest that the government does _not_ directly fund
| existing OSS development, unless it 's using said OSS and wants
| to buy development of a particular feature
|
| I would suggest that the government reimbursed 80% of small
| contributions, e.g. below $300 a year per project, and matched
| larger contributions, e.g. up to $3000 a year per project.
|
| As always, when an influx of free money is involved, cunning
| criminals would try to siphon it out without producing useful
| software. This is why I would limit such contributions to small
| amount per individual contributor.
|
| It makes really easy for a large enough group of fans fund a
| popular project for free, and double their larger contributions,
| without the government choosing the projects. It also would still
| require spending money, or just effort, to donate, so donating
| just for kicks is limited.
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