In contrast, abandoned open source software can be picked up and updated by whomever gets paid to, where abandoned closed source software needs to be reimplemented from scratch at great expense to the tax payer.

Not only that, open source software can be adopted by the community (who already paid for the development through their taxes) for their own purposes. Consider for example the productivity impact on business that starts using tools that it cannot afford to develop itself.

Office things like document management, workflow management, accounting, but also tools used in the science community, transport and logistics, anything that government does is represented in some other way in society.

This is a big deal and I hope that it will reverberate across the globe and become the new normal.

Whilst we’re at it, consider the impact of open data, where government datasets are available to the community.

Step 1: all software has to be open source

Step 2: governments, required by law, to fund FOSS projects in their tech stacks. Helped by organizations which trace project funding and lobbying to promote FOSS security by providing funding; a huge incentive to not insert malware

Step 3: coders are afforded dignity (UBI); given funds geared towards affording a maintenance team. Regardless of country of origin. Vital infrastructure is vital infrastructure. Talent is talent.

I support this move to Step 1

Where is the list of pauper gov’ts which force talent to get a job rather than be a talent and then maintain their projects with dignity!

Those jobs are mostly nonsense. Geared towards wasting our time building:

• yet another stupid web site

• yet another stupid smartphone app

• yet another stupid cloud base server instance