I’ve been thinking about transparency and security in the public sector. Do you think all government software and platforms should be open source?
Some countries have already made progress in this area:
- Estonia: digital government services with open and auditable APIs.
- United Kingdom: several open source government projects and systems published on GitHub.
- France and Canada: policies encouraging the use of free and open source software in public agencies.
Possible benefits:
- Full transparency: anyone can audit the code, ensuring there is no corruption, hidden flaws, or unauthorized data collection.
- Enhanced security: public reviews help identify vulnerabilities quickly.
- Cost reduction: less dependency on private vendors and lower spending on proprietary licenses.
- Flexibility and innovation: public agencies can adapt systems to their needs without relying on external solutions.
Possible challenges:
- Maintenance and updating of complex systems.
- Protecting sensitive data without compromising citizen privacy.
- Political or bureaucratic resistance to opening the code.
Do you think this could be viable in the governments of your countries? How could we start making this a reality globally?
Yes. Public money public code and all that.
However…
For security reasons, I wouldn’t feel comfortable if every one who wanted to could just contribute to it. It would need to be a closed developer group with security clearance. We can all look at what they’re doing, but we can’t insert our own patch commit requests to them ad nauseaum.
That’s entirely possible in the existing open source model with things like CODEOWNERS in github. I think it would work well for this concern.