Public digital services offered by our public administrations, financed with tax (public money), often use software with restrictive software licences.

Those licenses often

• restrict the sharing and exchange of publicly funded source code which prevents cooperation between public services and further development.
• create vendor lock-in and restrict competition which brings higher costs for public administrations and can result in the need to collect higher taxes
• can form a security threat because the source code cannot be analysed for potential vulnerabilities and backdoor scripts.

Joomla is free open source software which gives everybody the right to use, study, share and improve it. We support the Public Code initiative of the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) and fully support their initiative to try to convince political representatives to use Free Open Source Software as the default option for publicly financed software.

The reasons for Public Code:

• Tax savings – Similar applications don't have to be programmed from scratch every time.
• Collaboration - Efforts on major projects can share expertise and costs.
• Serving the public - Applications paid by the public should be available for everyone.
• Fostering innovation - With transparent processes, others don't have to reinvent the wheel.

Free Software gives everybody the right to use, study, share and improve software. This right helps support other fundamental freedoms like freedom of speech, press and privacy.

Credit: publiccode.eu

If you would also like to support this initiative, please visit the website sign the open letter at https://publiccode.eu/