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1title: Open Letter: Public Money? Public Code!
2date: 2017-09-12 21:25:00
3updated: 2017-09-13 08:59:52
4author: 46halbe
5tags: update, pressemitteilung
6previewimage: /images/pmpc.jpg
7
8More than thirty organisations ask to improve public procurement of software. The Chaos Computer Club is asking everyone to sign the open letter.
9
10<!-- TEASER_END -->
11
12Digital services offered and used by public administrations are the
13critical infrastructure of 21st-century democratic nations. To establish
14trustworthy systems, government agencies must ensure they have full
15control over systems at the core of our digital infrastructure. This is
16rarely the case today due to restrictive software licences.
17
18Today, 31 organisations are publishing an open letter \[1\] in which
19they call for lawmakers to advance legislation requiring publicly
20financed software developed for the public sector be made available
21under a Free and Open Source Software licence. The initial signatories
22include CCC, EDRi, Free Software Foundation Europe, KDE, Open Knowledge
23Foundation Germany, openSUSE, Open Source Business Alliance, Open Source
24Initiative, The Document Foundation, Wikimedia Deutschland, as well as
25several others.
26
27We ask individuals and other organisation to [sign the open
28letter](https://publiccode.eu/#action). The open letter will be sent to
29candidates for the German Parliament election and, during the coming
30months, until the 2019 EU parliament elections, to other representatives
31of the EU and EU member states.
32
33Public institutions spend millions of Euros each year on the development
34of new software tailored to their needs. The procurement choices of the
35public sector play a significant role in determining which companies are
36allowed to compete and what software is supported with tax
37payers’ money. Public administrations on all levels frequently have
38problems sharing code with each other, even if they funded its complete
39development. Furthermore, without the option for independent third
40parties to run audits or other security checks on the code, sensible
41citizen data is at risk.
42
43That is why the signatories call on representatives all around Europe to
44modernise their digital infrastructure to allow other public
45administrations, companies, or individuals to freely use, study, share
46and improve applications developed with public money. Thereby providing
47safeguards for the public administration against being locked in to
48services from specific companies that use restrictive licences to hinder
49competition, and ensuring that the source code is accessible so that
50back doors and security holes can be fixed without depending on only one
51service provider.
52
53**Links**:
54
55\[1\] [Open Letter](https://publiccode.eu/openletter/)