from Hacker News

Czech Republic: Petition for open source in public administration

by harvie on 6/6/25, 9:57 AM with 31 comments

  • by voxleone on 6/6/25, 12:22 PM

    This really seems to be obvious. Brazil has such a legislation[0]. However, the code for the important payment service called Pix, developed by the Brazilian Central Bank, is nowhere to be seen. Laws alone are not enough.

    [0]https://www.gov.br/governodigital/pt-br/plataformas-e-servic...

  • by Tajnymag on 6/6/25, 12:23 PM

    I dig the initiative. Unfortunately, I'm afraid the petition either will not fullfill its target number of signatures or gets denied to be acted upon. Our public sector is too corrupt to make public software contracts transparent like this. Overly expensive and prolonged projects would look even more suspicious with the code (and possibly progress) being publicly available.

  • by dismalaf on 6/6/25, 11:55 AM

    Realistically there's no reason government can't use open source software and open formats especially.

    Last time I had to fill out a government form in Canada, it was a PDF that only opened in the Windows desktop version of Adobe Acrobat... Even the Android version couldn't open it. Super annoying and completely unnecessary.

    Edit - I don't even care if they keep their server code proprietary. But just use free formats, save our taxpayer money on stuff like Windows and Office licenses, and make it easy for citizens to interact with them. I'd even rather they hire some more local devs than send money out of the country.

  • by belval on 6/6/25, 3:07 PM

    I think libreoffice suffers from a branding style issue more than anything else. It's not like Office 365 is inherently superior, but it looks like it is straight out of 2006 and that negatively impacts the users perception of it.

    My hunch is that if maintainers were to invest into making it look more like Office 365 (purely in a cosmetic way), the opposition to using libreoffice would reduce significantly.

    And for the old timers that will run to "Office 2007/10/13 was the best version and had the old UI". I get it and agree, but the average person likes nice things that look up-to-date.

  • by mikece on 6/6/25, 2:20 PM

    Are there government functions which CANNOT be done on Linux or LibreOffice?

  • by fside on 6/6/25, 12:25 PM

    Amazing step towards saving tax payers money and avoiding foreign proprietary software. I hope to see more governments moving in this direction. The only problem is, certain systems may end up being a maintenance horror story.

  • by fsflover on 6/6/25, 10:17 AM

  • by xigoi on 6/6/25, 9:46 PM

    As a Czech, how do I sign the petition?