Comment by flowerthoughts
9 days ago
I agree with others here that focusing your eyes on _using_ open source is, at least, an incomplete view of the problem.
What we (European software engineers) have been arguing, is that software that is funded by public means, such as from universities or institutions, ought to be made fully public, including ability to tweak. Thinking that open source software will help solve your budget and/or political problem is not something we're interested in doing for free. This excerpt here:
> In the last few years, it has been widely acknowledged that open source – which is a public good to be freely used, modified, and redistributed – has
suggests they see it as free candy, rather than the result of love and hard work, provided for free because it's nice. Pay for what you use, especially at the government level.
Of course, I strongly encourage the European governments to invest in open source. And if you're interested in giving money, I'm interested in doing work. Same as ever.
> software that is funded by public means, such as from universities or institutions, ought to be made fully public, including ability to tweak
Anyone who agrees with this should sign this petition made by Free Software Foundation Europe: https://publiccode.eu
While I agree with the sentiment I'm not sure this is actually viable.
For example here in Poland the previous govt invested in huge amount of software for digital govt services. From company formation, social insurance/heathcare (things like electronic prescriptions and patient data) to tax submission at all levels.
All of this is implemented using publicly documented open standards so anyone can write a client for these services, or anyone can use official Web clients, but none of the code is open source.
This is in contrast to previous governments that tried to implement all of this using proprietary standards where the companies hired were paid billions to deliver a system and they ended up owning the data exchange protocol and a client they distributed in binary only form. And they also profited from commercial software that implemented their proprietary protocols.
That worked (for the company hired)for taxes and they made billions. But for other stuff like medical, when they had no way to sell their proprietary standards they wasted billions and years of time and delivered nothing. Then subsequent govt threw the entire project out and built it on open standards.
So based on this experience I think using well documented open data exchange standards is much more important than software itself being open source.
Who cares the server side software is open source if you still can't submit your taxes with your own python script?
>None of the code is open source
Well, not all, for example mObywatel was recently open-sourced (in a ridiculous way, but still).
I think you raise some important points. In my opinion, a lot of code funded by public money should be open-sourced, but it's not as clear-cut as some people believe. I'll use this comment to point out some of fallacies that people responding to you make:
>Also open source government code means other governments can fork it, overall lowering implementation costs, while still keeping code sovereignty.
This is completely unrelated. French government won't deploy a Polish public health management website just because they found it on Github. For projects of such magnitude you need deep mutual cooperation between both governments, and a lot of changes. Making the code open-source is the least important part, the code can be just shared privately.
In fact, there are many such European code, data and information sharing initiatives. There are meetings and conferences where countries can discuss this on a technical level. The code is shared, just not via public channels.
>The government - and taxpayers - should care that having closed-source software means they are tied to the company that wrote it forever, so changes and bugfixes will be much more expensive.
If a private company owns code used by government for critical purposes and can take the government hostage it's outrageous and taxpayers should riot. This probably happens[1], but most code is either written by government itself, or at least government owns the code and can switch contractors if necessary.
In particular, AFAIR the government code we're discussing right now was written by COI (~central informatics department), which is a public institution.
[1] For example, governments use Azure and GCP, even though - to me - it's clearly shortsighted. Fortunately there was a wake-up call recently, and it changes slowly.
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Because if everything the government does is open source by default, the standards will be open standards by default. You can then add non-default code (closed source) for some applications (health, military).
Also open source government code means other governments can fork it, overall lowering implementation costs, while still keeping code sovereignty.
So your argument here is that while the software can be open source, it matters less, if whatever the software does isn't actually an open standard? Wouldn't "being open source with own custom protocol" essentially be as open as "open source or not, but software implements open standards" anyways?
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"Who cares the server side software is open source if you still can't submit your taxes with your own python script?"
The government - and taxpayers - should care that having closed-source software means they are tied to the company that wrote it forever, so changes and bugfixes will be much more expensive.
> Who cares the server side software is open source if you still can't submit your taxes with your own python script?
The management, the government and the eventually the tax payers.
If the government wants to add a small change to the tax code, if it's not an open source software, they'd have to hire the same company that wrote it in the first place. That's when the companies tend to jack up the prices to crazy numbers.
I have personally witnessed companies winning the initial government contracts by undercutting everyone and then charging them 10X for even the tiniest of modifications. Some times the companies even flat out reject the future contracts because they are stuck with a better project elsewhere and the government is stuck with useless old binary.
If the server side software is open source, depending on the policy, you can also submit your changes to that software that lets you submit your taxes with your own python script.
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> … public good to be freely used, modified, and redistributed
That doesn’t mean “free as in beer,” but “free as in speech.” I do understand the potential for misinterpretation, but one could easily add “after paying for it” and those freedoms don’t change.
English centric, although other languages may have collapsed gratis and liber into a single word.
> That doesn’t mean “free as in beer,” but “free as in speech.”
It occurs to me that this is a rather US-centric analogy.
I see it as English-centric, rather than US-centric. That differentiation isn't necessary in most (all?) languages.
Adopting the word "gratis" when the speaker means "at no monetary cost" also helps clarify things.
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Free Software should rename to Liberty Software. Instead, advocates loaned Spanish "libre" in the ugly FLOSS acronym (Free/Libre Open Source Software). If only we used "liberty" then we could stop quibbling over the multiple meanings of "free" and just talk about software liberty.
"Free as in bonus" vs "free as in liberty".
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The current socio-political climate is actually making this analogy less US-centric by the day :(
edit: I'm specifically referring to people losing their jobs and similar retaliations due to being on the left, or making public statements that the current administration and supporters don't like.
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Ah, this is the first time I understand the analogy because my mother tongue has two different words for "free", so I did not realize there was a need to differentiate
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Well if let’s say local government like municipalities are paying for school software where you can check your child ren grades.
If there is API I should be able to make my own mobile app to access data or use other app.
Providers push ads and do shitty stuff to block any and all 3rd party access.
If it is that bad business just go away.
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Neither beer nor speech were the topics of discussion. "Free as in speech rather than free as in beer" is an analogy commonly used to specify that you're talking about freedom rather than money.
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>That doesn’t mean “free as in beer,” but “free as in speech.”
what the hell does that mean
Today, we take the term "open source" for granted, but this wasn't always the case. There wasn't a single, universally accepted term to describe software that was freely shareable. "Free software" was one of the terms used, but it wasn't clear to non-programmers how this was different from proprietary software that was downloadable without having to pay for it. If you're not a programmer anyway, how should one type of "free software" be different from another?
Proponents of what we now call "open source" wanted to distinguish between two senses of the word "free". One sense is not having to pay for something, as in "Come over to my party, the beer is free." Anther sense is "I can criticize the government, because the country I live in is free." People in the free software and open source movement began to phrase the dichotomy in these terms to illustrate how one sense of the word "free" is much more important than the other. The fact that you don't have to pay for some piece of software is nice, but what's more important is that you aren't beholden to the company that developed it.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre
Free to use vs free to do what ever you want with
I too struggled to understand this when I first came across it.
Something that costs you nothing versus a freedom.
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Many projects made with government money are developed under the EUPL. Including some of the ones I've worked on. Oddly enough, they aren't available for download anywhere.
There is some EUPL software available here: https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/
Where exactly? I really see nothing that qualifies as open source there. Just text.
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Just to second what you are saying, over 2025 we saw some cases where small open source projects that underpin massive infrastructure are struggling for funding, and they don't even need that much! To me this is a place where the EU can spend a few dollars and have a massive influence on the sustainability and direction of open source projects.
European software industry is so interesting because my impression is that the (Western) OSS sector is largely supported by talented European developers. Just a vibe from interacting with hundreds of successful OSS projects.
Europe clearly has endemic talent, and I'm not even sure it's a funding problem rather than an organizational/leadership one. They could throw money at developers who already have decent if humble QoL, or they could bring them together to build large systems that can compete with American big tech.
I wonder if this is useful feedback to give? It would probably need to be more actionable. I’m hopeful the European open source community will take this invitation seriously.
Very few people truely understand the concept of Liberty.
FSFE campaign for that: https://publiccode.eu/
> software that is funded by public means, such as from universities or institutions
I think that might be the wrong approach, at least in this day and age. The spirit is good, but that software has cost good money to produce, and universities are dependent on external revenue. It's not unreasonable to charge for the things they produce.
Also, should e.g. an American company have access to software produced by an Italian university?
>The spirit is good, but that software has cost good money to produce, and universities are dependent on external revenue
Obviously, but most of university research - at least in Europe - is funded by public money. The idea is that research funded by public money should be public by default, unless there's a reason to do otherwise.
>Also, should e.g. an American company have access to software produced by an Italian university?
Yes, of course.
Yet it's not American "public" money that funded it.
And it's good to realize what 'public' means in this case: paid for by the general public. What companies produce is also (often) paid for by them, only not via taxes but through purchases, subscriptions, etc. Why should the software produced by companies be exempt?
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> It's not unreasonable to charge for the things they produce.
When it is funded publicly it certainly is. A key feature of the university research system is that it is where people are supported without the expectation that their work is going to be commercially useful in any near-term time frame. If something is going to be commercially valuable then people should develop it in the private sphere. Nothing stopping them. In fact, that is basically what the US does and it has been wildly successful and relegated the EU to being a technical backwater trying to figure out how to get out from under the US's commercial dominance.
> Also, should e.g. an American company have access to software produced by an Italian university?
Yes. Knowledge is for everyone. Even the Americans. Trying to hold back the progress of the entire species because the US knows how to pump out software is a remarkably myopic strategy.
> A key feature of the university research system is that it is where people are supported without the expectation that their work is going to be commercially useful in any near-term time frame
Idk where you got that idea from, but it's not an accurate picture since the mid 1980s. Yes, there is "fundamental" research, which is mostly a label for commercially not that interesting work (and cannot be expected to yield much open source anyway), but short-term project work and third-party funding are big. Also, much of the research is done with an eye towards profit, certainly in the medical and tech sector. And in the US, universities rely on a lot of private money.
> Knowledge
Knowledge isn't OSS. This (part of the) thread is specifically about (usable) software.
> the progress of the entire species
Them's big words.
That seems contradictory with the idea that software should be developed in the private sphere: closed source, proprietary APIs, patents and trade secrets are the antithesis of sharing knowledge.
The early mantras of OSS included "free as in speech" and "free as in beer".
Those were mantras of the Free Software movement. The open source movement (despite creating a lot of free software) was never about the moral stance of software freedom, but the practical benefits
So, as open source developers building a public good, where is our share of EU taxes?
Do you mean paying EU taxes for doing open-source? :)
> software that is funded by public means
What fraction of global software spending does the EU command?
I love the vision. I'm just sceptical of how seriously it's being pursued if it's another Brussels project without resource commitments.
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The EU definitely has no concept of "love". It was founded to make trade easier. All the fuzz about humane values and morals has been tacked on more or less recently, to keep up the support for it from the population. It is the literal wolf in sheep's clothing.
It was founded to make world war 3 impossible /through/ trade. By intertwining the economies of countries that considered each other hereditary enemies (Erbfeinde in German), it sought to make war too costly to consider. Humanitarian values are a core part of what became the EU.
That's one of the reasons the EU has had so many political problems with Hungary and Poland in the last decade: their drift to authoritarian forms of government (including weakening the judiciary in Poland) didn't impact trade at all. Nonetheless, it went against the humanitarian values.
I'm no EU fanboy (there's plenty to criticize), but regarding chat control and surveillance, it's important to see from which part of the EU institutions the push comes: the council. The council consists of the governments of the member states. It's not the big bad EU trying to force surveillance on the innocent countries; it's the governments trying to push domestically unpopular surveillance through the EU. The directly elected EU parliament has so far always prevented this push.
Given the current geopolitics, it doesn't look like the EU was very effective in eliminating the possibility of WWIII...
Yet because of it's existence, thousands of people have been able to love beyond their countries borders.
Wait, requiring a passport to cross a border did prevent people from forming relationships? I really don't follow. It is not like we were prisoners in our home countries before the EU was invented. And "love" has always been a huge driver of immigration, way before the EU. I even know people who sold marriage so that the buyer could immigrate. So why exactly was the EU a driver for international love?
What does "wolf in sheep's clothing" mean for you, concretely, outside of metaphors?
Well, the EU is pretty firmly in conservative hands. Ask a random EU citizen if they know that EPP is secretly leading the EU since its conception? They will likely not realize, because they fall for the piece&love propaganda. Just look at what VDL has done since she overtook the lead? Know where she comes from? Used to be defense minister in germany. Was called "Flintenuschi" back then. And now, magically, we are supposed to invest a shitload of money into military. Thats what I call a wolf in sheep's clothing.
Chat control and the never-ending drive to police our private communications.
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The US was founded to not pay taxes... Come on, you know well that most things evolve and grow.