> It could be legislative but it could also mean governments supporting FOSS development more.
To be explicit, if governments want to use open source software, which seems like a pretty good idea, they of course need to be aware of the fact that lots of it is hobbyist stuff tossed out into the public square with no quality guarantees.
To use open source code, the governments will have to fork and audit the code, and provide customer service for what is now their software. It can be done and it seems like a great way to make this stuff available for the non-technical community, but it isn’t free, of course.
> the governments will have to fork and audit the code
Why would they do this? It’s not like they fork and audit the code that they’re using now. They just trust that it’s safe because they paid for it. Which probably sounds incredibly stupid to anyone who’s ever worked for big enterprise, or just followed the news really.
When you sell somebody code you have an ethical responsibility to have done your best (and maintained a reasonable level of professional competence) to ensure it is defect free. Lots of companies don’t take that very seriously, which is bad, and a great reason to switch away from them.
At least the government can bring the CEO before congress and waste his day.
With open source code the responsibility is taken by the user instead. For me, and probably a lot of people here, we all mostly just ignore that, but it’s fine, because we’re free to ignore our responsibility to ourselves. In the case of a government supplying open source code to their citizens, the responsibility defaults to the provider, that is, the government.
> When you sell somebody code you have an ethical responsibility to have done your best (and maintained a reasonable level of professional competence)
Sure, this is why you outsource everything to the cheapest labor possible. It’s easy to say you did your best if you had a team of 40 people all drooling over the keyboard, and the best of them managed to hit the spacebar to commit.
Then you complain that competent employees just cannot be found.
Red hat has managed to make FOSS useable in enterprise environments since 1995. There is no reason why this model could not be applied to other FOSS projects.
I think that’s more-or-less what I’m suggesting. I mean, Red Hat exists to take responsibility for the code.
I guess what I suggested might be more intense than what they do, not actually sure what their workflow is. But it seems like the level of diligence that a government ought to apply, right?
To be explicit, if governments want to use open source software, which seems like a pretty good idea, they of course need to be aware of the fact that lots of it is hobbyist stuff tossed out into the public square with no quality guarantees.
To use open source code, the governments will have to fork and audit the code, and provide customer service for what is now their software. It can be done and it seems like a great way to make this stuff available for the non-technical community, but it isn’t free, of course.