For a number of years, the Geneva Cantonal Administration has been using a range of open source software such as Linux, Drupal, MySql and Apache Tomcat. The State of Geneva, however, wishes to broaden its role to become a real player in the open source field, by giving free access to the source codes of the software it develops for its own needs.
The State of Geneva aims at promoting its capacity to innovate, principally targeting other public domains whilst also benefitting from developer communities wishing to contribute to the evolution of its software.
Furthermore, the publishing of software source codes used by the public administration allows total transparency to be achieved by completely unveiling the building process of coding. The developing community will be able to point out weaknesses, identifying errors that will then be corrected as a result.
This “unveiling” of software does not constitute a marketing element but rather a cultural change amidst the Cantonal Administration. By proceeding as such, the State accepts it will be placed under scrutiny and may risk negative repercussions to its image. In summary, the functionality and security of Geneva State’s software may only benefit from this change; with flaws being detected that may not have surfaced during testing carried out solely by the Cantonal Administration.
This would not involve inventing a new publishing model of “open source”, belonging to Geneva’s administration’s, but rather rely on the most commonly used web service, GitHub; The free general public license, GNU Affero (AGPL 3.0), has been chosen by the State Council to publish the source codes.
The Affero GPL license has been chosen for this purpose as it has been designed for the Internet environment and does also not allow external users to privatize the code. Furthermore, the software was written by the Free Software Foundation, an internationally renowned and ethical organization.