US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Embraces FOSS, Publishes On Github 38
New submitter gchaix writes "The U.S. Federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has publicly embraced open source software and has begun posting its code to GitHub. From the article: 'Until recently, the federal government was hesitant to adopt open-source software due to a perceived ambiguity around its legal status as a commercial good. In 2009, however, the Department of Defense made it clear that open-source software products are on equal footing with their proprietary counterparts. We agree, and the first section of our source code policy is unequivocal: We use open-source software, and we do so because it helps us fulfill our mission. Open-source software works because it enables people from around the world to share their contributions with each other. The CFPB has benefited tremendously from other people's efforts, so it's only right that we give back to the community by sharing our work with others.'"
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (Score:4, Informative)
Excellent! Also: DoD open source software links (Score:4, Informative)
This is excellent news!
In some ways this policy (of the US Federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau) picks up from the the US Department of Defense (DoD) policies. Unfortunately, the DoD just changed the URLs for some of its information on Open Source Software (OSS), and doesn't (yet) have redirects, making them hard to find and compare. So here are new links to the DoD stuff on open source software, if you want them.
A good place to start is the Department of Defense (DoD) Free Open Source Software (FOSS) Community of Interest page, hosted by the DoD Chief Information Officer (CIO) [defense.gov].
From that page, you can reach:
If you are interested in the topic of DoD and OSS, you might also be interested in the Military Open Source Software (Mil-OSS) [mil-oss.org] group.
Re:Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (Score:5, Informative)
Democrats created the agency after the wall street crash but put Republicans in a provision that the agency could not act untill congress approved the chief of the Bureau. Republicans proceeded to block appointments to the agency. Thus the agency was in limbo till Jan of this year. Obama appointed someone to head the agency with a legal recess appointment.
Few typos you had there.
Re:Government working for the people??? (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, the CFPB really is all about the people. The problem is that the government created them and then proceeded to do everything they could to keep them toothless when, holy shit, they were actually trying to protect consumers.
Most Senate Republicans have said they would block Cordray's nomination – or any other – unless the president agrees to changes that would replace the director with a panel, let Congress more easily cut the agency's budget and allow an oversight panel of banking regulators to more easily override bureau rules.
http://www.cleveland.com/consumeraffairs/index.ssf/2011/07/elizabeth_warren_leaving_the_c.html [cleveland.com]
Congress wants to have "oversight" on the commission so they can basically tell it "no" anytime it wants to enact some sort of serious protections for us. Richard Cordray seems like a good choice, but we won't really know until the Commission starts making policy.