Not only the professional audience attracted our attention interview with the Deputy Minister for IT at Na Bulovce Hospital Martin Koníř. In it, he described how his team wanted to publish an internally developed application for eInability as open source, but came across hospital lawyers. They argued that it was a robbery of the state.
“I came across the fact that almost no one in the state administration does anything like that, almost no one can do it and our lawyers do not know it. They do not know where the path leads, and it is difficult to explain the whole issue of open source to them. The current position of our lawyers is that the development of open source and its further provision could be a circumvention of the paragraphs on the theft of public property, and that if I develop something with state funds, I cannot give it to anyone outside the hospital for free. Perhaps it would be possible if I built on some open source and according to the license had to stay in it, “Koníř described for Lupa.
He added that it would probably be good for the state and lawyers to deal with materials that clearly state that publishing software as open source is possible. It’s over succeeded the City Hall of Prague 3, which was the first swallow to release its subsidy software (the previous fight for this possibility is described in an interview by Deputy Mayor Štěpán Štřébl) and previously also to the municipal company ICT Operator, which published the Prague data platform Golemio.
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Golemio could serve as an example of how to approach open source software in other public institutions. The ICT operator provided Lupa with a legal analysis for the company’s board of directors on the issue of publishing the source code of the data platform as open source. On this basis, the Board of Directors decided to issue it. The analysis can be studied here (PDF), or below below.
Specifically, the analysis addresses which body of the company is competent to give consent to the publication of source codes, what is the impact on the market if a publicly funded product is published, and whether there are contractual restrictions under currently effective contracts.
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