ALEC is a clearing house of ideas... it's an repository for legislation they think is good. I'm proud that they have embraced legislation _I_ submitted here in (with the help of folks from Institute of Justice, the Kelo case folks) regarding asset forfeiture laws. NH's drafted law was a better model than previous drafts, so it was passed around, and now ALEC has adopted it... meaning that it will end up submitted in other states. That's not a bad thing.

As for the legislation you dislike, let's look at the issues:
1) 'takes away women's rights' = likely abortion related? I'm pro-choice, and wouldn't submit or vote for those, but those who are pro-life, is there a problem with them sharing good 'code' (ie legislation)?
2) privatize prisons... I'm not sure if I like that idea, but I strongly disagree with 'higher cost for fewer services' being a description... it's the opposite: lower costs. Not sure I think the tradeoffs are worthwhile, but some do.
3) 'lower worker's wages'... this could be a pile of bills... Right to Work? (I support it), Lowering the minimum wage laws? (I support that too - minimum wage hurts the fixed income and elderly and youth.)

I've seen ALEC on the official calendar as notices, so I have no idea what you think is being hidden, it's not. And Democrats have rejected working with libertarians, so they can't complain when folks work with the other side of the aisle instead.

Answered in other bits and pieces already...

The key to getting this passed elsewhere is to contact your state officials, and get them working on copying this... State Legislators like copying other states, they prefer not to innovate, just to make tweaks to existing items.

Yes, another excellent example of the potential here. And if other states adopt similar laws, the likelihood goes up of this happening... This is only good for open source developers, especially those in NH.

Jon was aware of the bill(s), but didn't have much to do with it, mostly due to time... but of course, his influence on me and so many others is one of the people at the root of this sort of thing.

GPL should be fine, all flavors.
Will dept wide distribution trigger the need to make those changes public? I think not, it's still internal distribution. I'd hope they will, and used examples like inter-state sharing of code as a benefit and cost saving tool.
How will they share? We have lots of state websites, including DOIT itself (who runs most of the sites anyway), a transparency website, and plenty of other places. I'd hope we end up with a opensource .nh .gov website, where the details and likely downloads (a read only repo?) will be kept, but that's up to the follks who implement, it's not in law.

As for voting machines, NH mandates paper ballots, so we legally CANNOT do electronic voting machines, and yes, I do hope this helps with the existing Diebold ballot scanners, or a suitable replacement someday.

I was kidding of course...
Yeah, 400 Reps means that all of the money is spent on the Senators.

And I wouldn't vote for increasing taxes, even without the AFP pledge, so that's not really a problem for me... I don't see it as a oath, more like letting folks where I stand anyway. Once you get inside this stuff, you realize that the media/partisan spins about ALEC, AFP, and all of the rest are more hype than substance.

As the submitter of the story, I just want to make 3 points:

1. Seth Cohn is a prime sponsor of the bill, and a fairly hardcore slashdotter. J'raxis is, like myself, an emeritus Director of Research for the New Hampshire Liberty Alliance... and a fairly hardcore slashdotter.
Q: What happens when the geeks rule? A: New Hampshire, baby!

2. I learned about the Free State Project right here on slashdot, back in 2003. How cool is that?

3. This is for real. This is not just web slacktivism. This is people taking back control of the government. AND IT'S HAPPENING. If you have a vaguely libertarian bone in your body, you really do owe it to yourself to see what's going on in New Hampshire.
I'd strongly recommend coming to the NH Liberty Forum. People come every year, and after the experience, go back to their home states. Just long enough... to pack!

actually, my bill did have only buying proprietary with a a requirement for doing the analysis, at first... but I agree with you, and the final version is neutral: all purchases require a TCO report to compare apples to apples.

They also care about cost, and transparency, and lots of other things. This is NOT regulation of indviduals, but only self-regulation...

And while I love NH, and it's the free-est of the 50 states, it's far from perfect, and it's not yet the closest thing you can get to a libertarian state, just the closest right now in the US.

That net positive was the result of political work. This was originally 2 bills, one Open Source, one Open Data... Both bills had high price tags on them, and it was clear both were fairly bogus numbers (IMHO).
I removed language that caused some of the estimates, and got them to agree that the positions needed for one could be met by the 3 positions in the other bill, and that cost savings of $300k were a bare minimum. (Originally, due to 'Consider', not a requirement, the cost saving was $0, plus 10 people to implement...)
That $300k is a guesstimate and likely low.
So merge the 2 bills together, for a sum total of net neutral/positive, and get it passed in a year where we cut $1 billion dollars from the State Budget. If it was fiscally costing anything, it would have been toast.

There was no upstream/contributing back in previous bills, as I was careful to not add lots of requirements. This bill is like steering the rudder on a big ship that takes miles to turn.... so it's high principles, low on specifics. The specifics will come from the CIO, and his staff, who 'get it'

It's been over a year.... I submitted the bill Fall 2010, post election. Previous work in 2006 and 2008 to get even a study committee to look at Open Source in Government died quick deaths (I was not in the House, just an citizen activist) but all of that work and others taught me how the system works. So really, I've spent about 7 years or so learning how to get stuff like this done.

details: http://gencourt.state.nh.us/bill_status/bill_docket.aspx?lsr=741&sy=2012&sortoption=&txtsessionyear=2012&txtbillnumber=hb418&q=1
And HB310 was the OpenData bill that contained the original other half.

Actually, most lobbyists remain in the shadows. But you can smell them. NH has them, but it's far cleaner than most places. Lots of Reps (400), and we only pay $100 a year for Reps and Senators (24 of them), and we elect everyone every 2 years.

The best line of the entire fight was the one lobbyist in a subcommittee meeting who said "I think we can replace the entire bill with one line" as a way to try and kill the bill.

I'm a former Libertarian, and remain a libertarian (small l), and yes, I'm an elected Republican.

Don't let the forums scare you aware... all of the real people tend to be too busy to spend much time on the forums.

Facebook is slightly better (search for Free State Project group and page)

No, but I've worked at a variety of companies with IT depts, and both created RFPs and proposals in response as a vendor.

Actually, I was concerned about that incident greatly, which is why this attempts a different sort of approach... The Open Government Data principles don't attempt to enforce A standard, just standards that fit the principles. You can be closed source and meet the principles.... it's just much harder to do so, as open source tends to work toward those same princples, and closed source doesn't always.