Which is incredibly sad, there's nothing special about it, it is actually a bad sign this is not public.

I remember a few years ago that an activist businessman started a campaign against a comically overpriced website for buying the highway stamps:

https://www.wmcgrey.cz/hackathon-znamkamarada/

Sure, it was a bit of a rant because said entrepreneur probably had his own bid rejected.

Agree with the ‘Oldtimers’ with the exception of the recent additions of LET() LAMBDA() REGEXTRACT() XLOOKUP() etc..

I'd argue this is not as big of a factor in governments as it is elsewhere (plus, they already use software that's way worse than LO in terms of UI/UX).

It's more that someone somewhere gets their % when selling them the commercial software, be it Microsoft or someone else.

Yes if Microsoft can have a say, all of them.

Look at berlin / ms

> Realistically there's no reason government can't use open source software and open formats especially.

> Last time I had to fill out a government form in Canada (...)

Without any evidence, let me argue why maybe it shouldn't. In the past, a common opinion that I have heard is that open source is more secure because all the code is out in the open.

The recent xzutils backdoor attempt [1] kind of led me to believe it's not really true, it's only true if many good-actor eyeballs, which are willing to donate their time for public benefit, are on the code.

Almost all of the government's code that I interact with are web apps that are potential targets of foreign adversaries -- tax filing web apps, prescription + vaccination scheduling web apps, family benefit applications, and more. (This is not in Czechia, but close.)

Now, would I want to read that web app code? Not at all, I couldn't care less about it. However, foreign adversaries would love to immediately start analyzing it. Extracting the entire country's health data or tax data would be a goldmine.

And even though there probably are several people actively paid to maintain security of these systems, I feel that the foreign adversarial agents would be much more motivated (and better paid) than government employees/software developers.

You could make a opt-out for national-security purposes for the code, but I feel almost all the code a government works on would have such an impact when compromised.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XZ_Utils_backdoor

(Disclaimer: I am a huge supporter of open source in general, contributed to the Linux ecosystem in the past and in my current job as an academic, almost everything I do is available out in the open in some way or another.)

Click on the link and you will find the button for signing with Identita Občana

Really wish this was a EU-wide directive. Code produced with the public's money really should at the very least be public, but even better with a permissive license.

FOSS is already in the blood of Europeans, now we just need the legislators to realize this is a good thing, and foster the ecosystem even more!

Why only code?

Anything funded with public money should have same proportion going back to the public (the organization running the area which funded it).

For example: a 100% EU money funded innovation should be free for everyone to use within EU and outsiders should license a patent.

50% public funding from state of Norway, then state of Norway has 50% ownership.

And so on.

I wonder there is not already such a petition in the EU or Germany. I searched, but didn't find any. Somebody who wants to create one? I'm not that good in writing such texts:

Europe: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/petitions/de/home

Germany: https://epetitionen.bundestag.de/epet/startseite.nc.html