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Comment by manquer

2 months ago

It shouldn't be surprising ?

It is the same problem people trying to open sourcing closed projects experience, there is all sorts of locked-in proprietary code which the developer and the customer only have the license to use but not share the source.

Even projects which from day one are staunchly open and built without direct commercial interests like government contractors need also suffer from this. The Linux kernel challenges for supporting ZFS or binary blob drivers in kernel/user space and so on are well known[1]

Paradoxically on one hand information wants to be free, and economics dictate that open source software will crowd out closed competitors over time, it is also expensive to open source a project and sometimes prohibitively so and that deters many managers and companies open sourcing their older tools etc, even if they would like to do so, involving legal and trying to find even the rights holder for each component can deter most managers.

If a government put requirements in contracts that the vendor should only use open source components in their entire dependency tree, it could drive the costs very high because a lot of those dependencies may not have equivalent open source ones or those lack features of the closed ones so would need budgets to flesh them out. In the short term and no legislature will accept that kind of additional expense, while in long term public will benefit.

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[1] yes kernel problems are largely a function of GPL, more permissive licenses like Apache 2 /MIT would not have, BSD variants after all had no challenges in supporting ZFS.

However a principled stance on public applications being open source by government would be closer to GPL than MIT in terms of licensing. Otherwise a vendor can just import the actual important parts as binary blobs "vendored" code and have some meaningless scaffolding in the open source component to comply.

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manquer

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Y_Y  2 months ago

Maybe FOIA should trump licensing in this case. Suppose I write a manual on how to issue bad parking tickets and hide them in a database, and then license that (in since restrictive manner) to the state of Illinois. I think the public's right to see that document is more important than my right to prevent copying and dissemination.

  • manquer  2 months ago

    That is true for all kinds of IP . The balance between the two is what IP laws do. Give inventors some protections to encourage innovations while keeping the public benefits in mind .

    Copyright is time limited author’s death and 70 years for individuals and 95 years for corporations .

    While there are arguments to be made for lesser duration , better preservation requirements etc the balancing of public good to private value is the basis of all copyright laws since statute of Anne 1709.

    In a court case you can get access to all types of information as part of discovery, if you are harmed or believed to have been, there are other avenues available for you . If you have standing to sue and the discovery requests are made by a competent lawyer you can get access to internal communications to trade secrets to any other document supporting your claim . you or your lawyer can not use such information for economic benefit or disclose it, they are still protected .

    Given that you have options legally to get this data , there is no public need that trumps private property rights because of real or potential harm that justifies blanket access by default

    PS: note software is not just copyrighted , it is also covered by patents (20 years) and trade secrets (no expiry ). Also while the law provides protection it does not require disclosure on expiry .