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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/)
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