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Massachusetts Builds Open-Source Public Repository
An anonymous reader writes "Massachusetts on Wednesday took the wraps off a new software repository designed to let government agencies make more efficient use of open-source software. The repository will be managed by the Government Open Code Collaborative, a newly formed group of seven states and four municipalities that will contribute and download open-source software and proprietary software designed by government agencies for their use."
The ITD website has some really kewl stuff on it like a legal toolkit for using Open Source software. Press releases on the sit seem to indicate that Republican Governer Mitt Romney is behind the move to open source. He'll be getting my vote when he runs for re-election.
...this? It sounds like the same thing.
Sounds like a perfect opportunity for another GForge installation... one more for the list!
The Army reading list
Do you really want the government involved in Open Source? It seems there are plenty of standards (GPL etc). I prefer separation of Source and State.
More proof that open-source is a religion here. No evidence of whether this repository will be any good or contain anything of value, just that's its OSS, hip hip hooray.
I've seen the light on sourceforge, and it ain't pretty.
Slashdot Moderation: From positive to terrible in 2 "insightful" posts.
I wonder if other states could use it.
If so it would make it easier for them to
move to open source.
The is great. I suppose this might be a little "off topic" but I think it is due in no small part to the growing public awareness that has come about because of the SCO case. We are starting to see a much more critical eye from the press and public officials to FUD put out by anti-OOS pundits. This is in no small part to the fact that more than ever, the OSS position is more organized and sounds a lot less like a bunch of hippies frothing at the mouth against "big business". We (many of us) have known for a long time the benefits to society and by way of those that work in the Public Sector, bodies that are here to benefit society, the ideas behind OSS, but in the past these ideas have not been articulated in a way that is understandable to the non-geek, non-IT centered thought patterns. A good PowerPoint wouldn't hurt (joke). You have to tailor your arguments for your audience.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
"Government agencies looking to use the repository must sign a contract with the collaborative. This grants an agency a license to any open-source and proprietary software it finds in the repository and prohibits that software from being used to make a profit."
Im not suggesting this idea is a _bad_thing_, it looks like a worthy endeavour, but doesn't this restriction go against the underlying GPL. ??
Government agencies looking to use the repository must sign a contract with the collaborative. This grants an agency a license to any open-source and proprietary software it finds in the repository and prohibits that software from being used to make a profit. This is a crucial component, since Massachusetts law prohibits commercial entities from making money off products developed by the commonwealth using taxpayer money.
The key words in the above are "prohibits that software from being used to make a profit". This means that any software they develop will either have to be done from scratch or from a very permissive license such as BSD, which allows the modification of the license of the code.
Furthermore, this license does not fall under The Open Source Definition or The Free Software Definition for this same reason.
Government Resources Open Code Collaborative, we'd have known their hearts were really in it.
Would there have been a Linux if the Government of Finland stepped in, instead of Linus & his bunch of highly caffeinated sharpshooters ?
I don't have a problem with government embracing OSS that is privately built using legions of programmers, because the programmers then have the incentive - fame ( in the OSS community), fortune ( ok, takes much longer to go IPO these days), hopefully both. But government managing OSS, where's the incentive ?
gd.tuwien.ac.at
As your school budget get's cut more and more and the money dries up to even afford school rate licenses you will become linux users.
Got Code?
Granted much of the software isn't as user-oriented, but that's not the point. The point is it is another government institution that has put real effort into making free software available to the public.
;)
http://fermitools.fnal.gov/
This is just one example I personally know of. Is this common at all? I'm too lazy to sift through every *.gov domain hunting for a software page.
Must sign a contract
Must use only stuff already in the repository
Can't ever make money - prohibited by diktat - so what's my incentive ?
Furthermore, how do you enforce these things ? If the repository is public, I could very easily take bits & pieces & repackage it as proprietary software & sell it, thus making money off products developed by the commonwealth using taxpayer money. If the repository is not public, then how is it open source ?
Seems overly complicated. Why doesn't the government of MA simply provide monetary incentives for programmers to contribute to existing repositories like sourceforge ? You could get things moving so much faster that way...or am I missing something here ?
Not to be cynical, but I really don't think there is much public awareness due to SCO. Even my geek friends haven't heard of SCO, although they're not hardcore computer geeks.
Free / Open source software is an effective way of making sure that the people benefits from the development. It's the ultimate public service. A penny spent on FOSS is a penny earned in future projects and software for the masses, while a penny spent on proprietary software is merely a penny spent.
Lemon curry???
Ok if there is one thing about the state of MA. Every project with the word "government" begins with a budget and end with an infinite budget.
Just look at Big Dig, that thing is never going to finish. It's a political blackhole for sucking up $$$.
Anyone else feel a little nervous that the usenet archives are in the hands of a private company, which could potentially fold or go under -instead of being made freely available in a federally funded repository?
Anyone has had the opportunity to archive USENET. But, only one company saw the value in this and invested in it, and Google bought them. They simply harvested all of those messages over the past 15-20 years. Don't like it? Create your own archive. Good luck finding a server that has a spool for the last 15+ years of USENET, though...
Maybe I'm just not understanding something, but if it applies to existing OSS projects, they are already on the internet for everyone to get/use (sounds pretty easy to me). If it's for new projects, why not just use something again already available publicly for creating/managing projects?
A modern day witchhunt.
.. one of the huge problems for software developers is that so much of the money in software development goes to people who have relatively little if anything to do with software development. OSS will actually (IMHO) do more to correct this than any other business model.
The step the state is taking will actually allow more money to be targeted at solutions and less money to be given to people who understood how to legally "appropriate" others ideas. Lets face it, with the IP world going the way it is going, if the government does not step in actively to fight the Copyright Law the fed has created, it will become fiscally dangerous to write and release code.
If the governing bodies develop their own code base by paying internal people to write what they need, sharing and building upon the efforts of other similar bodies, not only will they evolve better standards (happens easier when you share code development), but we will wind up with more "fill in your state here" based coders. I am sure that outsourcing will happen with much of the development eventually, but they will still need internal brain trust to make it all work, and the code will be available for others to build upon. So, instead of paying forever for marginally valuable software, they pay once for targeted solutions that can be expanded, replaced or enhanced as they see fit. Then they only pay to enhance or fix what they have. Since the code base is shared by other government programmers (or actually is OSS), they gain the benefits of OSS at least to a limited degree. In the end, it will be less expensive, a better use of tax dollars and more productive at the user end.
Maybe the states can use the savings to improve the education system. How many other professions can you attend school for 12 years of you life and only expect to make 50k to 60k per year? Heck, my wife worked at a cosmetics counter selling Cli**que and made more money than a teacher with less than a few years experience.
InnerWeb
Freud might say that Intelligent Design is religion's ID.
BillG's gonna be pissed now!
C|N>K
As a MA resident and one of the developers of the upcoming Zope 3 release, I was very positively surprised to see Zope (Z Object Publishing Environment) on the list of supported projects. I know that Zope has been used by the government for a long time, but that it is being embraced in this way is even better!
Go MA and Peter Quinn!
-- Stephan Richter
It is finished. The tunnels are open.
See, the last outfit I worked for, a private brokerage company, had 15,000+ employees scattered across a dozen cities. They wanted to do the SAME EXACT thing - "build and manage an OSS software repository". Same spiel - "We are using OSS all over the place, but each department has its own variant & version, so lets get together & pool our resources, build an internal repository of OSS & then manage it ourselves".
Guess what ? After a few months & a few hundred thousand dollars, the thing simply fell apart. The "department to build & manage OSS repository" was disbanded & people moved on.
Why ? Because folks in insurance wanted functionality that folks in mortgage didn't want that compliance wanted that legal didn't want that sysadmins wanted that webmasters didn't want that Perl hackers wanted that Java developers didn't want that....you get my point.
Different versions and variants exist because different people want different things. Trying to come up with a common software repository is just a pipedream.
Now, all the above happened in a PRIVATE company, where there are things like profit margins & paychecks - real incentive to make things happen. Imagine a government trying to "build and manage an OSS repository", with umpteen departments, terrific bereaucracy, and absolutely no commercial incentive. The mind boggles...
I thought the sun has set on the wrong side suddenly.
Hey, that's my password you are typing
That would be bad in innumerable ways.
But I do think that IT managers, both public and private (as well as press) are now starting to see the issues. I'm not sure that the general public, even psudo-geeks and computer literate ones, even need to care much about it, other than communication to public officials that how our tax dollars are spent is important.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
I was wondering WHAT could take the place of "THE BIG DIG", now I know.
This is a stroke of genious, fully worthy of a legacy for Teddy K. and J.F.Kerry. Just imagine, a government agency authorized to spend the governments money to store and maintain active datacenters for publically available program code they rip off the internet. Just imagine the Terrabytes waiting to be archived in some dismal data warehouse that will need a continually increasing budget. Best yet, the only people that will be aware of it will be a few legislators that actually read the budget and notice a single line item for "data storage".
If the air force had figured this out area 51 would still be a total secret and the budget would be high enough by now to have their OWN space station.
and no, I'm NOT cynical.
It doesn't matter what you wrap your emotions around, Reality is a brick wall specifically designed to scramble eggs
There's also the "economic crunch" that states are suffering. I believe Massachusetts is one of the harder hit states.
And when they're gone, the archive is gone. There are no servers w/ archives going 20 years back, and you know it....
When google goes the way of pets.com, a vital piece of internet history will go with them. If you're comfortable with that, fine. But your comfort doesn't mean that would not be a negative development for the world at large.
fire up your fav editor, and write a web spider to suck all of googles archives out.
then start archiving from the present feeds....
The reason is the Cost / Benefit of the two groups involved.
The benefactors of the program stands to gain a huge amount per member and as such is very motivated to Lobby and exercise Democratic rights for keeping the program.
The group paying (General Public) is large and the impact on each member is VERY small so they have little incentive to stop it through democtatic pressure. Result: No program ever dies.
The book is highly recommended.
Synopsis:
Democracy is not inherently good, Zakaria (From Wealth to Power) tells us in his thought-provoking and timely second book. It works in some situations and not others, and needs strong limits to function properly. The editor of Newsweek International and former managing editor of Foreign Affairs takes us on a tour of democracy's deficiencies, beginning with the reminder that in 1933 Germans elected the Nazis. While most Western governments are both democratic and liberal-i.e., characterized by the rule of law, a separation of powers, and the protection of basic rights-the two don't necessarily go hand in hand. Zakaria praises countries like Singapore, Chile and Mexico for liberalizing their economies first and then their political systems, and compares them to other Third World countries "that proclaimed themselves democracies immediately after their independence, while they were poor and unstable, [but] became dictatorships within a decade." But Zakaria contends that something has also gone wrong with democracy in America, which has descended into "a simple-minded populism that values popularity and openness." The solution, Zakaria says, is more appointed bodies, like the World Trade Organization and the U.S. Supreme Court, which are effective precisely because they are insulated from political pressures. Zakaria provides a much-needed intellectual framework for many current foreign policy dilemmas, arguing that the United States should support a liberalizing dictator like Pakistan's Pervez Musharraf, be wary of an elected "thug" like Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and take care to remake Afghanistan and Iraq into societies that are not merely democratic but free.
Help fight continental drift.
Ninnle IS Linux! It happens to be the distro that Linus himself has on his personal system.
Argonne National Laboratory maintains a MPI (Message Passing Interface) implementation for parallel computing called MPICH
The National Center for Biotechnology Information(NCBI), run by the NIH, develops a suite of utilities and libraries for developing bioinformatics applications called the NCBI Toolkit
For many OSS proponents, it's not religious zeal. It's JOY ... joy over finally having a critical alternative to closed-source AND proprietary systems.
The world is attempting to wake up from the Microsoft Age -- the Nightmare, the Dark Ages of Information -- which have been filled with secrecy, hidden potholes and vast mistrust. DRM is coming like a chariot being whipped by Microsoft and media corporations, and it frankly hates you, the common man. It's coming to turn your computer into a television set (and if I have to explain to you what's so horrible about TV, then you're intellectually lost).
Some OSS repository in one state government is not hurting you at all. I'm sure Mass. has plenty of Microsoft, Oracle, etc. licences floating around. Now they have more choices. More alternatives. And this kind of thing is quite beneficial; after all, your government should be able to make data without having it held for ransom by a proprietary and closed provider.
I'm warning you now. If you reside in willful ignorance long enough, you become STUPID. Is that what you really wanted in your life?
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
If the repository is not public, then how is it open source?
Open source does not necessarily mean that everyone has access to the source. It means that everyone who has access to the binary also has access to the source.
That's a very different proposition, but it's enough to ensure code freedom. (For common values of 'freedom', anyway.) That's how companies can legally modify open-sourced software for their internal use without releasing it. For that matter, that's how I'm able to modify open-sourced software for my private use without releasing it!
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
but the Navy space station is even nicer. Oh, did I type that out loud?
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Well I payed to have tactical nukes built. Were's the tactical nuke I'm owed?
The repository will be managed by the Government Open Code Collaborative
Given government's love of acronyms I can't believe that nobody though of Government Reusable Open Code Collaborative; aka, GROCC.
The license being used by the repository is explicitly not GPL-compatible. It prohibits any commercial use of the code. This is a primary reason for setting up the repository, as commonwealth-produced software cannot (under the current system) be used by entities to make money, according to the article.
May we never see th
...here in the Nordic countries:
http://www.nordicos.org/
Me like.
mainly just Common Unix Printing System...
Though the wardriving software for Linux wasn't as easy to use as the wardriving software for OSX, last time I looked at both.
That's about it so far...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
The best way to kill an idea is to let a government do it.
Especially the government of the People's Republic of Massachusetts. Even with the best of intentions they will screw up.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.