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German Parliamentary Committee Pushes for Open Source Friendly Policy
Qedward writes with this except from Computerworld UK: "Germany should change a law to enable public administrations to make their software available as free and open source, a German parliamentary committee has advised. German public administrations currently are not allowed to give away goods, including software, said Jimmy Schulz, a member of Parliament and chairman of the Interoperability, Standards and Free Software Project Group. The current law prohibits governments from being part of the development process in the free software community, he said. 'This is a clear disadvantage because it cuts off all benefits obtained from free software, such as being cost-efficient and state-of-the-art,' he said. Besides a recommendation that the government should explore whether the law can be changed for software, the group also called for the use of open standards in order to make sure that everybody can have access to important information, Schulz said. 'We also called for public administrations in general to make sure that new software is created as platform independent as possible,' he added. While the project group is not in favour of giving priority to one type of software over another, it said in its recommendation to the Parliament earlier this week that free and open source software could be a viable alternative to proprietary software." I think a fair rule is that, barring extraordinary and demonstrated need, all tax dollars for software should go only for the development of software for which source is available gratis to all taxpayers, and that secret-source software makers are free to change to fit this requirement any time they'd like to have their software considered for a bid.
Believe it or not, the idea that the government shouldn't give away things has some noble reasoning to it. Not sure of the specific reasoning in Germany, but it might range from avoiding favoritism to the government getting value for the work it produced.
But like all things, it can lead itself to a less than well-meant outcome.
In the USA, it is possible for public and governmental employees to not only contribute to open source software, but also to have that be part of their particular job.
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ImageJ is a public domain software package developed at the NIH (National INstitute of Health) by Wayne Rasband.
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NIST also has software that is publicly available, though not all of it is "public domain".
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I don't know whether the "public domain" status is used because Gov't entities are not allowed to hold copyright on materials they develop; I know I've seen copyright labels on a lot of NASA products and images and animations. I strongly feel that products developed from our tax dollars ought to be available back to us and between/amongst different governmental departments so as to save us money and development costs.
"Requiring a government to "opensource" software is a nice but difficult proposition."
No, it isn't.
"The biggest problem I see is this: how can say a Western government justify giving stuff free to Al Qaeda or the Chinese?"
Simple: they don't. That they can't avoid a third party from giving it away to Al Qaeda doesn't mean they themselves are giving it to Al Qaeda.
And even then, open source protects *the source code*, not the binaries. Take the GPL as an example: somebody should give you sources only after they give you binaries. Well, don't give such a third party access to the binaries unless they abide not to give them in turn to Al Qaeda. Done.
"So effectively, you subsidize software development in other countries."
That's true and an intended effect. But even if simple and readeable by everybody even if they didn't sell their soul to Mephistopheles (aka lawyers), it doesn't mean it isn't legaleese and once it's legaleese, you can always find ways to diverge from its first intent (i.e.: one thing is copyright, and a different thing export laws).
Current government policy is downright hostile, this change would make it less so. But I wouldn't characterize the resulting policy as "open source friendly"; at best it would make policy comparable to other European nations.
Whether this passes remains to be seen. This is just a committee proposal to study the issue; that might be a serious effort, or simply a way of railroading the idea. And industry in Germany is very powerful. They usually don't have to bother with inconveniences like bribery or lobbying, they just say what they want and get it.
"While some software (voting machine) should always be open, need ALL software a government uses fit this requirement?"
A big resounding "YES!"
Please take the time to read any single open source license. Just to name the most famous two, BSD and GPL, please, read them.
Imagine we are talking about an ultrasecret software that makes Al Qaeda bosses piss their pants and all [My Beloved Country]'s enemies, past, present or future, surrender on the spot. "Oh, my God! we don't want this to be open source, do we?"
Well, do we? Now, answer a question to me: being such a software licensed under either GPL or BSD forces the government to give it away to anyone?
But then, imagine such a software is developed by a contractor and the government forces such a contractor to license it under GPL or BSD. Does such agreement force the contractor to give the software away to anybody else? Does it force the government to give it away to anybody else?
Just to state the obvious, if you answered "yes" to any of the questions on the paragraphs above, you really need to re-read the GPL and BSD licenses again.
"Say you're developing software to determine the lowest fuel cost route for airplanes. Say it saves the user $1M/year.
The government needs it, so do, say, 9 airlines. Say it costs, in round numbers, about $5M to develop that software (15 work years, give or take). Should the government impose 5M in taxes on the population, then fund the full development cost, and release it to the public? Or should the government pay, say 500K, as would those 9 airline companies."
But you already answered your question! "the government needs it" It either makes a business case or not. You said the government saves a million a year, so it returns its expenditure in five years and above that it's net benefit.
Well, if it makes sense, it makes sense, what does it matter to the government who else benefits? (and that's even disregarding the case that those other 9 companies might be from its own country, thus giving them an edge that will return to the GDP and to the government itself in form of taxes -what do you think that made USA a world's leader but government effort specially after WWII?).
And your example hides an implicit (two indeed): that if the government doesn't develop it, others will do that will sell the software at a fair share of the cost to all the implied agents and without a hidden agenda. Well, the last 20~30 years demonstrates beyond all doubt that's not the case: most famous recent billionaires come from software world, and even Adam Smith 101 will tell you that's impossible under "invisible hand"-guided free market: closed source has effectively suffled wealth from the people to the hands of a few because once your hypothetical software development company has developed its software, it won't sell it for 500.000 to each of the nine companies plus the government: it'll sell it for the full 5 millions each, and the ten of them will buy it because -as I already stated at the beginning, it still makes economic sense for them.
And then, they'll use the free 45 millions they got out of the transaction to lobby the government to pass laws that ensure the company no other competitors will enter the market in the future.