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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.
"Software ... are"
I was under the impression that as an 'uncountable', software became singular, like sand.
You wouldn't say "sand are..."
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.
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.
No other company can support software so well, in critical moments, or produce software as functional.
Whatever you're smoking must be really, really good.
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 ;)
there, fixed it: "A Law Requiring Open Source, Bulgaria Got"
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.
>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.
Hahaha, let me tell you a little story about the support and functionality of MS software:
A couple of years ago I attended a week long training course at Siemens in Germany, where they taught us how to use their CNC systems, Sinumerik mostly.
Now in the decades past CNC was very primitive, one could implement it with punchcards. Today's CNC is a completely different beast: Its a full computer stuffed with ASICs and other high tech stuff to be able to come close to the hard realtime requirements that you need when you control a multi-kW mill mounted on a 12 axis robot going as fast as the drive allows because every second shaved of the manufacturing process is worth money.
(Just to set the scene)
This is something the trainer there told us when I asked him how it came to be that Linux was running on those devices, which for an ultra-conservative corporation like Siemens, seemed a bit odd to me:
Siemens apparently used Windows XP on those boxes, modified of course. In fact to ease the communication with Microsoft, Siemens even has/had some of its employees working directly on site at Microsoft.
Apparently however even that level of cooperation was not ideal when it came to implementing new features and working around the weaknesses of Windows.
What really caused them to drop Windows was that one day the Engineers wanted to know if a certain feature could be implemented on Windows and how (The trainer did not say what feature it was).
For six weeks Microsoft said nothing, only to eventually tell them that it was not possible at all.
On a whim and mostly for fun, one engineer asked the same question about this feature on a Linux discussion board.
Result:
30 minutes later he had the answer that this feature was possible on Linux, along with detailed step-by-step instructions how to do it.
Ever since then the Sinumerik boxes use Linux and the engineers at Siemens could not be happier about it.
"Linux is Communism".
Oh wait, so was Bulgaria.