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Bulgaria Got a Law Requiring Open Source (medium.com)
All software written for the government in Bulgaria are now required to be open-source. The amendments to put such laws in motion were voted in domestic parliament and are now in effect, announced software engineer Bozhidar Bozhanov, who is also an adviser to the Deputy Prime Minister at Council of Ministers of the Republic of Bulgaria. All such software will also be required by law to be developed in a public repository. Bozhanov writes in a blog post:That does not mean that the whole country is moving to Linux and LibreOffice, neither does it mean the government demands Microsoft and Oracle to give the source to their products. Existing solutions are purchased on licensing terms and they remain unaffected (although we strongly encourage the use of open source solutions for that as well). It means that whatever custom software the government procures will be visible and accessible to everyone. After all, it's paid by tax-payers money and they should both be able to see it and benefit from it. As for security -- in the past "security through obscurity" was the main approach, and it didn't quite work -- numerous vulnerabilities were found in government websites that went unpatched for years, simply because a contract had expired. With opening the source we hope to reduce those incidents, and to detect bad information security practices in the development process, rather than when it's too late.
This seems like something all open governments should do.
Not because RAW RAW open source! but because it assures standards adopted by the government are open to competition
"Linux is cancer"
-- Steve Ballmer
TTIP will take care of that and pretty much everything else.
Hopefully more countries will follow!
Ironically MS is open-sourcing their stack bit by bit anyway. No other company can support software so well, in critical moments, or produce software as functional. It may be pretty, and may even involve fundamentally incompatible paradigms, but it does work well for non-techies much of the time.
I rather think they have the potential to be both a largely-open-source company...and dominate still, because nobody moves as fast yet produces software the still works so well, with the ability to support software so well. They have, after all, not just been supporting their own, but software for thousands of other companies while they are at it (to maintain compatibility, MS actually has access to code for many other critical applications).
Stuff like this freaked-out the Balmer's of the company, but I suspect the typical engineers there are like "when this becomes near-universal we'll be fine."
unless they chicken out, like Edgar Villaneuva in Venezuela etc.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Surely it wouldn't be difficult to create a more informative, and grammatically imaginative, headline that "Bulgaria Got a Law Requiring Open Source"?
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
This just in: nobody gives a shit about Bulgaria.
"Software ... are"
I was under the impression that as an 'uncountable', software became singular, like sand.
You wouldn't say "sand are..."
Once they start ordering new custom software instead of using what's already available but closed source, lobbiests will likely start complaining that the law is costing the government $$$ and should be repealed because the cost of Adobe or whatever is only $100 (nicely ignoring the amount of users allowed to use it).
How much bespoke software is custom written for the government of Bulgaria?
Why didn't the government get a new contract, or even better, a new vendor? If the government didn't know how to fix it's old problems, a purchasing guideline may not be the answer.
Here's the real plan: To have other people fix the problems for the government, for free. Of course, if the government won't update it's IT services in a timely manner, the problem remains.
The actual text of the law says software requires "opensource-like licensing". So, nope.
I'd love for some country to go,"The Internet is a giant library. Anything that can be copied and shared is free to do so." Barring getting invaded, it'd provide your country with ready access to media, educational books, and maybe even new social media sites where you link all the media you like.
seriously, having the government locked into proprietary standards does not help anyone but the makers of the proprietary software and the congress critter that made it happen.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Aiding and abetting the United States spy agencies to put the entire global public on surveillance under false assertions and events.
The spy agencies create the fear then pretend to protect you from it but obviously it doesn't work except in news media fiction.
They also do this whole thing on the public's dime.
laws in motion were voted in domestic parliament
"Domestic" parliament? A better word have been "National" Parliament. Bulgaria is still a sovereign state, not a province of a kind of EU Empire.
Let's hope that microcrap and friends don't complain to their employees at the White House and make then deliver freedom to Bulgaria.
Murica fuck yeah!
Thanks to TTIP and TPP, Bulgaria will soon be sued for damages to future profits.
I am from Bulgaria, I work in IT, in other words i am interested in those kind of news.... but slashdot is the first media that covers such news. I think this is some kind of mistake or WIP project. This is not yet true!
Open source is not a silver bullet. Many eyes make shallow bugs only works when you have many eyes. Making something open source isn't going to attract many eyes if there's no interest in it...if it can be used for identity theft or financial robbery it will however attract criminals who will spend a lot of time analyzing every bug until they find a number of exploits and launch an attack.
Huge corporations and political interests of other countries will do a lot to crush this initiative.
This is practically communism ruining capitalism.
Big money will look at what their market is worth (considering piracy not much) but the precedent and perception is far more expensive. I expect palms to start getting greased right about the time the growing pains of this new method reach a peak.
Next they will want to invalidate software patents. Must be shot down quick.
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
Re: "With opening the source we hope to reduce those incidents, and to detect bad information security practices in the development process, rather than when it's too late."
This is a classic case of misdiagnosing the problem and thus coming up with the wrong solution. Open Source does nothing, repeat NOTHING, about initial build quality. Proprietary source and FOSS have all the same attributes in this respect. Fixing software bugs may be more achievable in FOSS, at least in principle.
No, the problem here is actually that Bulgaria was not maintaining support. Witness the statement that "... went unpatched for years, simply because a contract had expired." Note that contracts expire all the time, everywhere. If you maintain support you renew the contract. In fact I'll go farther and suggest that even without contracts, internal support will often be viable, but I'll bet that Bulgaria didn't have/hire/retain internal IT personnel in lieu of contractors. These sites weren't simply without contractors, they were likely suffering from systematic neglect.
Ultimately this is about being Bulgaria. Bulgaria doesn't have a lot of money and was likely trying to run their IT systems on a shoestring. FOSS doesn't correct that problem and mandating FOSS will do nothing to make sure that Bulgaria's IT systems stay up to date. So what if they are FOSS? If no one is looking at maintaining Bulgaria's tech infrastructure, FOSS isn't a solution.
You can be "open" and still neglected. That's Bulgaria's problem, in the end. Neglect.