Switzerland mandates all software developed for the government be open sourced
Switzerland mandates software source code disclosure for public sector: A legal milestone
Meanwhile my country’s apps don’t let you open them if you have Developer Options enabled on android :)
And they’ll prob make it illegal for you to bypass and hide developer options because to them that means you’re hacking them.
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.
Public money, public code!
IMO this should be the case for everything developed using public money, looking at you, pharmaceutical companies…
But it will be written in Schwiizerdütch, so no one outside of Switzerland will understand it. I think it’s a dialect of Perl.
They’ll do with Swiss dialect of Lisp with grüezi instead of define.
Wwwaiiiiiittt… So does this mean OS too? Is an entire country switching to the dark side? Linux, I mean Linux
“Windows wasn’t developed for the Swiss government, it was developed for the general public and we adopted it off the shelf.”
This makes me curious in the US on whether or not government app source code would be provided via a FOIA request.
You’d think so, but the answer is no. They’ve employed companies like Microsoft, Oracle, etc. to write up the security handbooks that says proprietary software is more secure. Heck, even electronic voting systems in the US is closed-source.
Heck, even electronic voting systems in the US is closed-source.
How can elections even be trusted to be fair in that case?
Simply, you can’t. I’m personally all for an open source alternative for electronic voting. I can bank online, but not vote online. I’d trust an open source online voting platform more than I’d trust poll workers to not skew some votes. I’d also like to be able to track my vote and ensure it was cast for the person I voted for.
