Submission + - UK Citizens Petition No. 10 For OSS From Councils
R0UTE writes: A new petition has cropped up on the UK site for petitioning government. It is aimed at getting local councils that develop new software for the Timely Information to Citizens (TIC) project to release the code under an Open Source licence.
As the projects are funded by public money it makes sense to me that it is owned by the public and we therefore have the right to see the code produced by such a project. From the petition text :
"The Department for Communities and Local Government (CLG) is running a project called Timely Information to Citizens (TIC). As part of this project, several local authorities are being given funding totalling approximately £1m to develop software and web services to improve local information and service provision.
While CLG's aim is that these projects are incorporated into a "best practice toolkit", we ask the government to reduce duplication of effort and expense and make this software available for other users at the earliest opportunity by releasing each package on deployment under an OSI-approved open source licence.
Though we welcome these projects themselves, as citizens we cannot and do not support this substantial sum of public money being spent to create private, proprietary software."
An interesting idea for sure, but will the government take heed of this, I doubt it very much. Nevertheless I have signed, any other UK citizens willing to try and convince Gordon of this?
As the projects are funded by public money it makes sense to me that it is owned by the public and we therefore have the right to see the code produced by such a project. From the petition text
"The Department for Communities and Local Government (CLG) is running a project called Timely Information to Citizens (TIC). As part of this project, several local authorities are being given funding totalling approximately £1m to develop software and web services to improve local information and service provision.
While CLG's aim is that these projects are incorporated into a "best practice toolkit", we ask the government to reduce duplication of effort and expense and make this software available for other users at the earliest opportunity by releasing each package on deployment under an OSI-approved open source licence.
Though we welcome these projects themselves, as citizens we cannot and do not support this substantial sum of public money being spent to create private, proprietary software."
An interesting idea for sure, but will the government take heed of this, I doubt it very much. Nevertheless I have signed, any other UK citizens willing to try and convince Gordon of this?
