Bulgaria Passes a Law Requiring Open Source

You wouldn&#x27;t know the background motivating this decision unless you have been a frustrated user of the nearly non-functional software of Bulgarian state institutions.<p>Ludicrous amounts of money are paid by the government to a selected niche of companies for developing all kinds of useless websites which barely work under load and have abysmal implementations with blatant security holes. This law can act as a safeguard against such &quot;epic failures&quot;, so that the taxpayers can be aware of what they are actually paying for. 300k euros for a static website? Let&#x27;s hope it&#x27;s over.

I remember the CEO of Information Services JSC (the de-facto Bulgarian monopolist in governement software procurement), prof. Mihail Konstantinov, making the ridiculous claim on TV that &quot;We can&#x27;t release the source code of the elections counting software. Anyone who has the source can hack into the system, even children know that. If you don&#x27;t understand that, you should tear your diploma&quot;. Glad to see that morons such as him will no longer have the final say.

&gt; It means that whatever custom software the government procures will be visible and accessible to everyone. After all, it’s paid by tax-payers money and they should both be able to see it and benefit from it.<p>I&#x27;ve been thinking that way for a long time, nice to see I&#x27;m not alone. Let&#x27;s hope other jurisdictions follow suit.

Would be nice if bigger nations like USA, UK&#x2F;GB, Germany would adopt this policy and have to open source the exploits and root kits that where develop with tax payers money.<p>Open source XKeyscore, yay!

&quot;The fact that something is in the law doesn’t mean it’s a fact, though.&quot;...&quot;companies will surely try to circumvent it.&quot;<p>Yeah, this is very well said. Most laws in Bulgaria are either not enforced or &quot;avoidable&quot; :)

This is very interesting, I wish more countries followed suit.<p>In my ideal fantasy world, at some point other countries might have a look at one of the open source projects of Bulgaria and collaborate when the goals align closely.

It mentions &quot;OpenOffice&quot;, which is now defunct.<p>In any case it is good. Future procurements will show how well the law is applied.

I&#x27;ve personally seen the Dutch government spend millions implementing open source software. This was something that could&#x27;ve been fixed for a fraction using a closed source solution. After a couple of years, the project was canceled and the closed source solution was implemented anyway.<p>I&#x27;m not saying that using OSS is a bad thing. I don&#x27;t, however, think that &#x27;OSS only&#x27; is the solution to the problem at hand.

That is great news, hope it works out well.

If facebook, google, twitter and others are able to run their world scale software on OSS solutions without being hacked, I am sure that OSS can power some national scale software as well.

Every law passed by Bulgarian parliament serves only one purpose - to put pressure on somebody, so people in the shadows can get a slice.<p>edit: A new government agency is tasked with enforcing the law<p>Ah, I see now.