Switzerland mandates all software developed for the government be open sourced
Switzerland mandates software source code disclosure for public sector: A legal milestone
“unless precluded by third-party rights or security concerns”, so this bill does nothing
-
I imagine that the company would have the burden of proof that any of these criteria are fulfilled.
-
Third-party rights most likely refers to the use of third-party libraries, where the source code for those isn’t open source, and therefore can’t be disclosed, since they aren’t part of the government contract. Security concerns are probably things along the line of “Making this code open source would disclose classified information about our military capabilities” and such.
Switzerland are very good bureaucracy and I trust that they know how to make policies that actually stick.
It is written like that, so that MS 365 still can be used. Some worker here go literally crazy, if they have to work with alternatives to MS 365…
This is not what the law is about. They can use closed sourced software just fine.
This is a law about software developed for the Schweiz government. If they needed a new CRM system or database system for medical records, it would be open source.
And they can use Outlook to inform everyone about it without problem.
While there might be some truth to that, I don’t think MS 365 would qualify as “developed for the government.”
Ah, i see… The „Security“ is used for the digital ID that is coming. Sadly, the part about Security of the ID is closed source to be “secure”. Someone has to teach them that security through # obscurity is no security…
-
It does one thing: make every contract have a clause specifically to combat this…
I still think a good chunk of the code will be visible. You can have all the code up to the point where you call the proprietary function. Obviously you won’t get to see what’s inside that function but you can guess. Also, a lot of proprietary libraries have that functionality really well documented.
Open source will always be the best option, especially with a government supporting it! Imagine what government funding could do to accelerate improvements to Linux
Russia does some of it, probably most countries in EU and China do it.
I work for a company which creates software for the government. Super exited for more OSS projects.
the government.
The Swiss government? What’s it like?
Yep, the swiss government. Complicated is probably the best word to describe it. We are a very decentralized country (which makes sense for a country that was founded as a coalition to fight the royals that oppressed its people, none of those partners want someone to rule them) so every canton (state) does a lot of things differently than the other ones. But it is nice to see that after years of neglect they try to actually push digitalization by establishing common standards and systems.
Can somebody explain me Proton in detail? 😉
I would love to but the explanation is private.
It is something that is not Electron
100% accurate!
It’s nice, although a bit cheesy ;)
Meanwhile my country’s apps don’t let you open them if you have Developer Options enabled on android :)
Which country?
India
Same here, sure there’s hacks and workarounds that don’t require root… But still why the extra step…
I just want my window animation speed to be faster, why does that disqualify me from reading stuff sent to my government mailbox.
And they’ll prob make it illegal for you to bypass and hide developer options because to them that means you’re hacking them.
Country: it’s illegal to have software development skills 🤡
Well, in the last few years there was that guy politicians labelled a criminal because he inspected a web page and disclosed multiple amateur vulnerabilities.
That’s fucking hilarious
This is the way it should be. Governments around the world have spent decades enriching big tech with public money, when they could have pooled their resources and built FOSS software that benefited everyone.
Same goes for science and everything else funded by tax payers.
I hope more governments do this, especially after how unsurprisingly shit (read: insecure) microsoft has become.
Has become? When was it ever not?
Yeah it’s always been shit but I do think they may have been referencing how the number of exploits and malware has only gotten worse over the years
That’s disappointing, they should mandate obligatory WhatsApp use country wide.
please tell me this is a joke
Wasn’t there EU-wide law about it?
Switzerland isn’t in the EU
It is however in the schengen area. so regulatory alignment on a lot of issues is still required as if they were members
Not really, Schengen is for travel purposes mostly. Switzerland applies many EU regulations but that’s “voluntary”.
Ah. Right. It’s easy to forget it.
Hopefully more governments will follow this. At the very least, the taxpayer should have the right for whatever software’s source code that it funds development.
I guess it’s not convenient to have Microsoft and Apple scan your company images and employee emails. Even take screenshots automatically if they can get away with it.
Appearently other countries are fine with this, which surprises me much more.
I guess the corpo version of windows have these sort of things turned off? But ms can turn them on whenever they want.
This is specifically about software developer for the government. Microsoft office is then not included.
Been contracting for the Swiss government for years, namely ASTRA. They have 0 concept of how that should happen. It’s their IP, but they don’t want to take it, host it, maintain it, or do anything else with it once the project is done.
Do they just expect others to foot the bill? Sure, free GitHub exists, but everything else? Open sourcing without maintenance is abandonware and usually useless.
Step 1: all software has to be open source
Step 2: governments, required by law, to fund FOSS projects in their tech stacks. Helped by organizations which trace project funding and lobbying to promote FOSS security by providing funding; a huge incentive to not insert malware
Step 3: coders are afforded dignity (UBI); given funds geared towards affording a maintenance team. Regardless of country of origin. Vital infrastructure is vital infrastructure. Talent is talent.
I support this move to Step 1
Where is the list of pauper gov’ts which force talent to get a job rather than be a talent and then maintain their projects with dignity!
Those jobs are mostly nonsense. Geared towards wasting our time building:
-
yet another stupid web site
-
yet another stupid smartphone app
-
yet another stupid cloud base server instance
Yup and then they move the spyware/malware/etc into a layer below where nobody knows what is inside…
How is your baseband modem in your smartphone doing, by the way?
Separated over the PCIe bus with an IOMMU between it and system memory, as well as hardware switches to disable it if I’m not reachable
I haven’t found a way to remove it entirely. It’s the only option I’ve found so far, but if you know of a better designed option, I’m certainly interested
-
In contrast, abandoned open source software can be picked up and updated by whomever gets paid to, where abandoned closed source software needs to be reimplemented from scratch at great expense to the tax payer.
Not only that, open source software can be adopted by the community (who already paid for the development through their taxes) for their own purposes. Consider for example the productivity impact on business that starts using tools that it cannot afford to develop itself.
Office things like document management, workflow management, accounting, but also tools used in the science community, transport and logistics, anything that government does is represented in some other way in society.
This is a big deal and I hope that it will reverberate across the globe and become the new normal.
Whilst we’re at it, consider the impact of open data, where government datasets are available to the community.
Whilst we’re at it, consider the impact of open data, where government datasets are available to the community
*imagines Moscow* You still would need more trees and fix old rain drain system.
I’ll gladly upload my stuff into some repo they allow me to. I’ve inquired about it in the past - I wrote a piece of sw that fills a requirement hole left by a widely used SCADA tool - but they outright forbid it. That was about a year ago.
My point is less about open source and more about how they have no clue how to handle their IP even now. It’s a nice gesture at best (at least currently. Maybe there’s more on the way).
Who is “they” in your statement?
If it’s the company who is contracted by the government, it seems obvious (to me) that the requirements to make it open source provides the push to make it public.
If it’s the government, then I don’t understand your point.
the Swiss government, namely ASTRA.
Whilst we’re at it, consider the impact of open data, where government datasets are available to the community.
That sounds like it would be pretty useful to get better quality statistical research papers (well, I guess quality would depend more upon the researcher), doable by people without corporate backing.
Here’s some of what’s happening in my country, Australia:
- https://data.gov.au/
- https://data.wa.gov.au/
- https://data.qld.gov.au/
- https://data.nsw.gov.au/
- https://data.vic.gov.au/
- https://data.sa.gov.au/
- https://data.nt.gov.au/
Not sure where Tasmania and the ACT are at, but those links are the federal and most state government data portals.
Behind that is much variety of data, from land use to baby names and everything in-between.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics has its own site:
NZ as well: https://data.govt.nz
Though this it takes work for the different government departments to maintain. The team at data.govt.nz work with the different government departments to try to identify suitable data sources and get them into an update cycle, but there’s definitely not all data that can be released on there.
Yeah, same kind of process in Oz.
AFAIK, it was triggered by doing an annual event called GovHack where people were encouraged to create “hacks” with government data. It included software developers like me, data mentors from many different government departments, people with an interest and several departments with questions.
I think NZ’s is a similar story. GovHack is run in NZ as well, though I haven’t personally been involved in an event.
A decade ago I participated in three and won several awards but was disappointed with the government response to all our collective efforts and stopped participating.
Specifically “not invented here” was prevalent as a response to projects that represented hundreds of man-hours of effort.
It was demoralising to say the least.
I’m not sure what the missing ingredient was, but two of our projects were directly related to government effort in relation to public transport and public housing. Neither went anywhere despite face to face presentations to senior stakeholders in the relevant departments.
The third was a search engine with a completely different approach to that in use by the popular engines.
UK too: https://data.gov.uk/
Here’s Tasmania:
And here’s the ACT:
Nice, so everyone will see the shitty code used by the administration
As opposed to what?
I wonder how this will impact us infrastructure types. I am sure there must have been an exception to the rule at least once in my career but I can’t recall any, code I have made for all governments has been open source and if you lost it somehow I would just email it.
My only concern would be the systems that my code runs on top of won’t be willing to share. It is one thing to demand it from me, another to demand it from Siemens. Then you add in very low level code for individual devices such as VFDs
I guess the nightmare would be that PLC/DCS/VFD makers would basically be blacklisted and I would have to work around that fact.
My only concern would be the systems that my code runs on top of won’t be willing to share. It is one thing to demand it from me, another to demand it from Siemens. Then you add in very low level code for individual devices such as VFDs
It is about code they pay to create…
Hmm seems to be pretty easy to get around the rule.
I think that’s a good call.
If the people are paying for it through taxes, it shouldn’t be contracted out to some company who lock further development behind their continued involvement.
