Instead of talking about Open Source Software, should we be talking about Public Software?
Hypothesis: The most successful open source software projects are marketed to software developers and system administrators because those are the only people who understand and really value the open source nature of a piece of code. Open source is not a very valuable selling point outside of this community.
Anecdotal experience: I have been getting some serious glazed looks when trying to talk to non-software experts about open source, why it’s great, why we do it, and why they should want it, even when the value proposition is clear to me and I think should be clear to them, e.g. governments can share the code, the upgrades, the support costs and avoid vendor lock in etc.
Since most of our customers are government entities, the real value of sharing our software is in sharing it among these public entities. Hence my interest in the term Public Software.
This could be more than just semantics and marketing. A city IT staffer at City Camp, when asked about releasing her city’s code under an OSS license instead suggested, based in part of push-back she had received from her city’s attorneys, that a new open source license be created that would allow any government (or perhaps non-profit) entity to use the code, but would not making available to commercial entities. This may sound like yet another license that wouldn’t really be very different, and in many ways that’s true, however, for government entities there is a perverse sort of difference: They are afraid of spending the public’s money on projects that will benefit specific private interests. Making OSS that is then used by a commercial entity to make a profit could be construed, perhaps by a litigious proprietary software vendor who didn’t get to do the project, as just this sort of misuse of public dollars. Similarly, they are afraid of giving away things that the public has paid for. However, there seems to be some openness to giving it away, as long as it is only being given to other public entities.
Of course this goes a long way to limiting the value of OSS, as the commercial software world has been a huge supporter and enhancer of OSS projects to date. It also goes against OSS morals because if it is not open to commercial users, it is not totally open. That said, I think we should discuss this, as I think it would help us coalesce a movement of government entities around shared software development and support by making the value more clear to them. Open is, in some sense, too open a concept.
I did not coin this term. Here are some of the Google results of a search for Public Software. They closely mirror the OSS world, showing that this isn’t much of a departure in spirit, but may be in practice: The GNU General Public License, The Public Software Foundation, Software in the Public Interest, The Free Software Foundation, The Public Software Group, Public Software: a model for Latin America, etc.
You seem to be making two points/arguments here:
1) Public agencies are having a hard time grasping the value of FOSS.
2) Public agencies are worried that FOSS will produce value for private interests, and that this is wrong and/or unfair to tax payers who funded the development of the software.
You probably won’t be surprised to hear that I think (1) is important and something that we should work hard to address, and that (2) is utter hogwash.
For (1), I’d be happy to sit down and talk about how we can better make the case for the value of FOSS for government agencies, and I’d be very interested to hear more about the responses you get when you currently try to sell it to them. Do they simply not understand the value proposition? Do they understand it but think it’s unlikely to make much practical difference?
As for (2), the adoption of the term “open source” was in fact a strategic move on the part of (some of) the FOSS movement to make free software more appealing to business. On the whole, I think it was a pragmatic choice that has significantly furthered the interests of the free software movement.
The government produces lots of things that benefit private interests (also known as citizens). We call this stuff infrastructure. Some private interests benefit more than others from this — e.g., trucking companies — but that doesn’t mean the government builds roads that only the postal service can use (in fact the argument for doing that would be much stronger than developing “government-only” software, since the marginal cost of road use, unlikely that for software, is non-zero).
It’s also pretty weird to think that the government might be legally prohibited from giving citizens access to something they paid to develop. At the federal level, it’s just the opposite: All works directly produced by the federal government are automatically in the public domain (i.e., they fall outside the protection of copyright).
Granted, works produced by state governments (and those produced for the federal government by private contractors) can be copyrighted. In this case, if the concern is that a private interest will exploit the work without “giving back,” it would seem that the best license would be a strong copyleft license, like the GPL (which I would be ok with, though this is actually one of the few areas where I think a more permissive BSD-style license is preferable).
Lastly, even if we were to hypothetically start producing/advocating for “public software” as defined by (2), this would do nothing to fix the issue with (1). That is, we’d have successfully limited the value of the software to non-governmental interests, but we would have all the same challenges in showing the value to agencies as we do with FOSS.
Also, I should have been a bit clearer that I recognize that you’re simply relaying arguments that you’ve heard from agencies, and that you don’t necessarily believe them.