Kinda bothered by the state supreme court interpretation, but mostly because I don’t think ANY “per-se” exception should be given to to anything build with public money or to which the public owns the rights to: source code, file layout, schema, whatever it is, security and privacy should be the only few exceptions given. And even then, SOME form of access should be provided, unless the government can make a very strong case that the security implications outweigh the public’s right to know where the fuck their taxes are going.
Yeah, if we’re wishing for ponies, I too would like to require, once and for all, all software systems built with public money to make their source and documentation available. No idea who’s going to bankroll that lobbying effort, though. And you can imagine the entire industry of public-sector IT contractors who would fight it.
This case was fought over the interpretation of the security exception. As long as the law still thinks that security by obscurity is a reasonable and defensible practice, there’s a long way to go.
You might find this amusing… a while back, I was being paid with public money to build a thing. I was arguing for the thing I was building to be FOSS, and the manager on the government side pushed back. Their concern was that, apparently, if the source were released to the public with no restrictions, contractors could then sell things built off the software back to the government, claiming (and charging for) to have done the full development themselves.
My team responded to that objection by suggesting that a copyleft license should address those concerns. And, shockingly, our response carried the day. We got our library released under LGPLv2.
I was happy with that because I would like to require all systems built with public money to be released to the public as FOSS. And I’m proud to report that it worked once, but I don’t want to personally work in that space anymore. It was exhausting.
If you can FOIA a query, can you ask for ‘SHOW TABLES’ and then “SHOW CREATE TABLE” or “DESCRIBE” for each of them? It cant be a file layout if it’s in the format it describes, thats a contradiction, right..? Right??
I’m very impressed that the trial court judge was actually willing to understand the nuance and rule in their favor. The vast majority of judges out there are either unwilling or uninterested in understanding technologies beyond their possible legal or economic effects.
I’m also interested in the lack of a legislative intent argument from the side of the City. I guess even the City suspected the lawmakers didn’t know what they were specifically talking about.
I’m dying on the hill that a schema is not a file layout by itself.
A schema provides the logical structure of the data,
while a file layout ( or I’d rather call it data layout or just encoding since I want to separate the storage location from the layout itself) only describes how it’s saved anywhere.
I can have a schema which is encoded in json, protobuf, capn’proto and saved in the host system.
All of those can have an identical schema, but are represened by wildly different formats.
Yes, data layouts and schemas both have structures, but a schema describes the logical structure of the data
while data layout describe how arbitrary logical structures are encoded into the actual representation.
Generally I could just use a tree with nodes describing what type of data structure they are. Leafs being Primitives such as Int32 etc. Lets do this in binary and also not care about Endianness. To further simplify we can also only look at static structures such as tuples, named tuples (structs).
I can encode data within that tree Breadth-First or Width-First and put it into my file. This in my opinion would represent the file layout. So even though the original tree (Schema) doesn’t change the file layout does.
I’m writing a network / encoding library with my custom type system based on this principle.
This Illinois Supreme Court ruling just massively annoyed me. And I’m not even from the US ._.
Kinda bothered by the state supreme court interpretation, but mostly because I don’t think ANY “per-se” exception should be given to to anything build with public money or to which the public owns the rights to: source code, file layout, schema, whatever it is, security and privacy should be the only few exceptions given. And even then, SOME form of access should be provided, unless the government can make a very strong case that the security implications outweigh the public’s right to know where the fuck their taxes are going.
Yeah, if we’re wishing for ponies, I too would like to require, once and for all, all software systems built with public money to make their source and documentation available. No idea who’s going to bankroll that lobbying effort, though. And you can imagine the entire industry of public-sector IT contractors who would fight it.
This case was fought over the interpretation of the security exception. As long as the law still thinks that security by obscurity is a reasonable and defensible practice, there’s a long way to go.
You might find this amusing… a while back, I was being paid with public money to build a thing. I was arguing for the thing I was building to be FOSS, and the manager on the government side pushed back. Their concern was that, apparently, if the source were released to the public with no restrictions, contractors could then sell things built off the software back to the government, claiming (and charging for) to have done the full development themselves.
My team responded to that objection by suggesting that a copyleft license should address those concerns. And, shockingly, our response carried the day. We got our library released under LGPLv2.
I was happy with that because I would like to require all systems built with public money to be released to the public as FOSS. And I’m proud to report that it worked once, but I don’t want to personally work in that space anymore. It was exhausting.
Gotta wish for ponies to get a rescue cat with 3 legs and asthma
If you can FOIA a query, can you ask for ‘SHOW TABLES’ and then “SHOW CREATE TABLE” or “DESCRIBE” for each of them? It cant be a file layout if it’s in the format it describes, thats a contradiction, right..? Right??
Indeed, that would seem like the next step to me.
I’m very impressed that the trial court judge was actually willing to understand the nuance and rule in their favor. The vast majority of judges out there are either unwilling or uninterested in understanding technologies beyond their possible legal or economic effects.
I’m also interested in the lack of a legislative intent argument from the side of the City. I guess even the City suspected the lawmakers didn’t know what they were specifically talking about.
I’m dying on the hill that a schema is not a file layout by itself.
A schema provides the logical structure of the data, while a file layout ( or I’d rather call it data layout or just encoding since I want to separate the storage location from the layout itself) only describes how it’s saved anywhere.
I can have a schema which is encoded in json, protobuf, capn’proto and saved in the host system. All of those can have an identical schema, but are represened by wildly different formats.
Yes, data layouts and schemas both have structures, but a schema describes the logical structure of the data while data layout describe how arbitrary logical structures are encoded into the actual representation.
Generally I could just use a tree with nodes describing what type of data structure they are. Leafs being Primitives such as Int32 etc. Lets do this in binary and also not care about Endianness. To further simplify we can also only look at static structures such as tuples, named tuples (structs).
I can encode data within that tree Breadth-First or Width-First and put it into my file. This in my opinion would represent the file layout. So even though the original tree (Schema) doesn’t change the file layout does.
I’m writing a network / encoding library with my custom type system based on this principle. This Illinois Supreme Court ruling just massively annoyed me. And I’m not even from the US ._.
Here’s a post by the guy who initiated the FOIA request