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this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2026
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That might not be practical. But everything else done with public money should be open source. A lot of these software projects are more or less necessary for every city globally. Collaborating on a few apps and programmes is a lot more sensible then everyone having an app custom build by a contractor.
Public money of one jurisdiction shouldn't necessarily pay for things so a different jurisdiction gets them for free. It's an opportunity for the city to generate some revenue to offset other costs. Or it could be structured as a non-profit effort to develop open source, paid by ongoing grants from a number of cities that would use it - that would be nice, but difficult to orchestrate .
See my reply to the other comment.
I really do believe that the most sensible way to formalise it is just requiring publically funded code to be open source. Requires less complexity than co-op, and works out the same if enough countries opt-in.
See this as an example:
https://github.com/Governikus/AusweisApp/
https://commission.europa.eu/about/departments-and-executive-agencies/digital-services/open-source-strategy-history/european-union-public-licence_en
Right, so keep it simple and just open source it
so any other country should get free access to all the software the UK tax payer invested in?
nah. I don’t think so.
And the UK taxpayer might save money by using open source projects funded by other municipality in different countries. This is already the standard for some EU projects.
Could some countries 'freeload'? Sure. But what's the actual cost for that? The people in those places getting better software, while the original users are no worse off?
Could also help with less wealthy countries having access to software they couldn't otherwise afford to develop.
Oh no! Somebody else might benefit from something you would've made anyway, at no additional cost to you! The horror!
We also get free development and contributions from others.