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