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US Government Launches Code.gov To Showcase Its Open Source Software (venturebeat.com)
An anonymous reader shares a VentureBeat report: The White House has announced the launch of Code.gov, a website that shows off U.S. government open-source projects and offers relevant resources for government agencies. By launching this site the White House is hoping to improve public access to the government's software and encourage the reuse of software across government agencies. The launch comes four months after the White House introduced the Federal Source Code policy, which specifically mandates that government agencies "make custom-developed code available for Government-wide reuse and make their code inventories discoverable" at Code.gov, with certain exceptions. The new site already has almost 50 code repositories from more than 10 agencies, U.S. chief information officer Tony Scott wrote in a blog post.
Is a neat step in the right direction? A giant leap in the wrong direction? A skillful act of misdirection while we circle-jerk our big election?
Whats wrong with Sourceforge George? Whats wrong with the GitHub, Bub? Ready for a hack jack?
Spinup another web-server, upload all the code, NSA and Kremlin notice, now its just a node.
It sends attacks across the sea, and at you and me,
Now stock-up on that food and water, prepare for world war III.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
Hey this is cool and all but if Trump becomes President we won't need it. After all, his 10yr old son is tremendous at "cyber!" He can do it all.
What about citizens contributing so such said disasters are avoided while potentially decreasing the cost (in the form of decreased taxes)?
-- Brought to you by Carl's JR
FWIW, several of the showcased projects are actually hosted on Github.
This one caught my eye - https://github.com/bro/bro - presented to you by the DoE
> Bro is a powerful network analysis framework that is much different from the typical IDS you may know.
Bro has numerous tech videos too on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/B...
I think that this could be beneficial. In fact, in some crucial areas, where there is a public interest in accountability, the government should almost certainly require a contractor to open source the produced software. Of particular interest in the current news, I think that the recently reported issues with voter machines could be remedied with open source and independently auditable software.
Whether or not there is anything interesting, wrong, or nefarious with the software, it would give people a peace of mind knowing that when they use such a machine, the underlying code could be viewed by anyone who knows what they are doing. It would also help to expose errors quickly to ensure that everything is as fair as possible. If the government was to release such code early enough in advance, it could be reviewed and hashed out far in advance of elections.
I am sure there are dozens of other such applications where we could prevent even the possibility of some corruption (or accusations of corruption when a mistake is made) by simply open sourcing some government software products.
Would kids who write code that then becomes part of larger projects be covered under child labor laws?