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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
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."
"Software ... are"
I was under the impression that as an 'uncountable', software became singular, like sand.
You wouldn't say "sand are..."
How much bespoke software is custom written for the government of Bulgaria?
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.
Not so. The TTP is trans pacific. The one being negotiated with the EU is separate.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
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.
"Linux is cancer" to proprietary closed source charge per seat-based business models ;)
That is why the parent Said TTIP, notice the I.
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.
"Linux is Communism".
Oh wait, so was Bulgaria.
Iceland might be that country, seeing as their Pirate Party is poised to become the biggest member of parliament... :)
systemd is not an init system. It's a GNU replacement.
This is not a "Open Source will fix everything!!!11!1!1One" suggestion.
Ponder this.
1. Government writes software.
2. Government is elected by the people and should therefore be held accountable by the people.
3. The only way a Government can be held accountable would be if the people can inspect what it's doing as much as possible (some areas like national security may make this problematic).
Would it not, given these three facts, then be logical to say:
If the government writes software, or hires someone to write software for the government, then the software SHOULD be open for inspection.
systemd is not an init system. It's a GNU replacement.
O, thank you.
I had remembered the names as being more different. (As the other poster noticed, I even got the name of the TPP wrong.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.