Ukraine open sourced it's star government services app
opensource.diia.gov.uaThe navigation doesn't work in Firefox.
> Uncaught TypeError: document.querySelector(...).computedStyleMap is not a function
This happens because they hijack the built-in hash navigation, essentially breaking functionality that would've worked if they just left it alone.
If you really need to use shiny features unsupported in all browsers use polyfills, we learned this decades ago. Screwing up something so simple doesn't give me much confidence in the rest of the project.
I am immensely impressed that the developers here are using widely-supported but technically-experimental interfaces and methods. Without IE-like polyfill bloat.
One of my recent favorite experimental features is TLS Encrypted Client Hello, which protects against one of the last MitM attacks used by authoritarian governments to filter the Web. I note that while ECH is experimental, it is also widely supported, including by Firefox. Firefox needs to pick up the pace with implementing the CSS Typed Object Model API, which they thoroughly document on MDN. Bravo to the Ministry of Digital Transformation. And for those users who want better Web API support with good privacy protections, there is Brave (I only switched away from Firefox back in the day because Chromium had better experimental Wayland support, and better memory management on my dinosaur).
Brave, the chromium fork that hijacks affiliate links? GTFO.
And you know, they could still use this feature on chromium browsers, just feature test it before breaking it on Firefox. Or use any of the many ways to achieve the same result, classList.includes is one. It's webdev 101, don't be impressed by their lazyness.
And an aside, MDN is maintained by users like Wikipedia, not by Mozilla. If you're missing something there you can just add it, even if Firefox will never support it.
Open source is a gift left by the wayside for people to pick up or not. It's not a customer-vendor relationship.
You're free to react as you want, but it's good to keep in mind that if you want the maintainers to care, you should be willing to enter into a customer-vendor relationship.
I would agree with you unless this was the official government app for interacting with the government. They have a bigger responsibility than a random library. It is nice that it's open source though so people can audit it.
Audit, you say.
I once put an easter egg into some open source code used by many millions of people. Nobody found it until a colleague talked about it at a conference maybe a decade later.
People talk about audits, I at least don't think audits can be relied upon to find much. It's nice when audits happen, don't misunderstand, but I don't assume that opening the source of something means that any badness will be found. That assumption requires several leaps of faith.
I'm just giving them the benefit of the doubt, I don't assume anything.
The license used seems to be EUPL-1.2 for everything they've released.
FSF says it's copyleft comparable to the GPL, but isn't compatible with it. (although, can be re-licensed by following a two-step process)
GitHub repo uses EUPL, but the website has another license…
Diia provides access to digital documents and government services for Ukrainian citizens. The documents in the mobile app are accepted by officials. Also a few government services are available.
Wow! This is insanely cool!
Is that even legal to have it closed source in a democracy???
In the roman law tradition, which Ukraine follows, everything's legal except that which is specifically made illegal.
If there's no law against it, then it's legal.
Being a democracy has nothing to do with it. If you're an adult, you should learn the basics of law, because the law applies to you anyway.
Is all software developed for every democratic government open source? Weird take to call it illegal. They only got this system up a couple years ago, and they've been dealing with an invasion for the last 2 years.
All software running on citizen devices should be open source in a democracy. As they should have a noscript/basic (x)html portal, if reasonable, to lower the technical exit cost of any "app platform" and to provide a fair, low technical cost, and nearly equilavent access to any alternative platforms past present and future.
"The software industry" is full of scammers (planned obsolescence, etc). It is very hard for govs (democratic) to stay clean here.
EU started to regulate Big Tech, it is only the beginning.
California and all the other US states AFAIK have no standard license whatsoever for their works.