A small victory: Swiss law forces all code publicly commissioned to be open source

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Ignacio.Agullo
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Joined: 09/29/2009

The Open Source Observatory (OSOR) of the European Union reports that Switzerland has passed the "Federal Law on the Use of Electronic Means for the Fulfilment of Governmental Tasks" (EMBAG), making it mandatory for all software developed for the public sector in the alpine country to be open source:

New Open Source law in Switzerland | Joinup
https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/open-source-observatory-osor/news/new-open-source-law-switzerland

From the news: "all public bodies must disclose the source code of software developed by or for them, unless precluded by third-party rights or security concerns".

Credit where it is due, the most active campaign in Europe demanding states to make that change is the campaign from the Free Software Foundation Europe, running for at least seven years now:

Public Money? Public Code! - FSFE
https://fsfe.org/activities/publiccode/publiccode.en.html

Yes, we all know, open source is not libre. But this is a step in the right direction. We people in the rest of Europe should keep demanding public code - now we know that progress is within reach.

Kind regards,
Ignacio Agulló.

iShareFreedom
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Joined: 12/20/2021

Why this code isn't free software if respect the four essential freedoms? https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Open