Adgangforalle.dk - public money, proprietary license

[Carsten Agger]

On 12/12/19 7:16 PM, Paul Boddie wrote:
> On Wednesday 11. December 2019 12.57.10 Carsten Agger wrote:

> Certain kinds of politicians don't want the state to be doing anything that 
> might interfere with the supposed "right" of people to make good money, 
> especially when it is good money off the state. So with some persuasion, 
> revenue streams are protected by imposing limitations on what taxpayer-funded 
> works may be used for.

The funny thing is that this goes completely against what some other
government agencies are doing - in the state as well, but especially
local governments.

I should know, our company is working a lot with the municipalities in
the OS2 collaboration:

https://os2.eu/

which is basically about municipalities building and sharing free ("open
source", as they call it) products, mostly (but not always) hiring
external companies like ours to do the coding. And they're definitely
going in the direction of "more of this, please" since they are getting
tailor-made software and are saving a lot of money in the process.

But that said, yes it probably *is* due to not wanting to "compete
unfairly". It's just that it goes against their policy in other respects
(the Digitisation Agency also have free software produced from time to
time). Maybe they were lobbied specifically about this product from
potential competitors, like you suggest.

It's just an especially absurd example of state-funded software that
(strictly speaking, they might allow it in practice) can't be used in
public libraries since that's really "commercial use".

>> So it's Danish people's tax money preventing Danish people from using,
>> let alone sharing, studying and improving this software - created by
>> Danish tax money - and once again, it's us as taxpayers who are
>> financing the very agency that's withholding this software from the public.
> Sounds like a perfect target for the Public Money Public Code campaign.

Indeed, what I was thinking.


Best regards,

Carsten