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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.
Care to explain that? Open source can (and usually is) copyrighted. It has nothing to do with competition.
It does: you may regard the code itself as documentation. Describing a process, some method of calculation, a file format processed, etc. Which in turns makes it easy to write a competing implementation that does the same job.
For closed source software that is much more difficult. It doesn't even matter whether the code is open in the "libre" sense: as long as you can inspect the code, you can figure out what it does. Same with copyrights: that serves to give author(s) some control over copy & paste style use of the code. But it doesn't prevent others from writing a competing implementation.
Having code that's actually "libre" open source is still nice though for other reasons.
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.
A lot. Every god damn ministry or government agency have their own information systems, IRS got several huge ISs, every relatively big municipality has its own ISs. All-in-all calculated in US prices accumulated worth(?) of all the ISs is probably more than $500mil. For a small country like ours this is a lot..
And the biggest problem is not the price but the quality and maintainability of the bespoke software. Recent example: IRS is distributing free software for reporting VAT by the companies. This software trough the years was notoriously buggy and caused a lot of trouble for the business. Currently it is not even able to run on Windows 10 and there is no indication when it will available.