<story><title>New Hampshire on the cusp of enshrining software freedom into law</title><url>https://libreboot.org/news/usa-libre-part2.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cjpearson</author><text>That price is going to scare away most voters. $1000 per citizen for something that few people care about.&lt;p&gt;You could argue that the cost estimation is a worst-case scenario. It assumes that 90% of the affected software will be made compliant, but it&amp;#x27;s also possible that they just use proprietary exception for most applications. It would cost much less in that case, but it would do so by abandoning the purpose of the bill.&lt;p&gt;The bill died in a unanimous vote last time around, and it&amp;#x27;s not going to anywhere close to success this time either. However some other parts of the 2022 bill (considering libre solutions for new applications, limiting NDAs and non-competes, allow audits of software used in criminal cases) are more feasible and might stand a chance if they&amp;#x27;re also split into new bills.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>leereeves</author><text>&amp;gt; $1000 per citizen&lt;p&gt;How did they reach that figure? $1.4 billion dollars seems like far too much.&lt;p&gt;Edit: Interesting. Their methodology talks about rewriting all the state&amp;#x27;s public-facing server side applications to be open source. (Hence the cost.)&lt;p&gt;I thought the bill was just requiring that the public be able to use libre browsers and apps on their own devices to access state services, not that the state&amp;#x27;s server code had to be open source.</text></comment>
<story><title>New Hampshire on the cusp of enshrining software freedom into law</title><url>https://libreboot.org/news/usa-libre-part2.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cjpearson</author><text>That price is going to scare away most voters. $1000 per citizen for something that few people care about.&lt;p&gt;You could argue that the cost estimation is a worst-case scenario. It assumes that 90% of the affected software will be made compliant, but it&amp;#x27;s also possible that they just use proprietary exception for most applications. It would cost much less in that case, but it would do so by abandoning the purpose of the bill.&lt;p&gt;The bill died in a unanimous vote last time around, and it&amp;#x27;s not going to anywhere close to success this time either. However some other parts of the 2022 bill (considering libre solutions for new applications, limiting NDAs and non-competes, allow audits of software used in criminal cases) are more feasible and might stand a chance if they&amp;#x27;re also split into new bills.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>default-kramer</author><text>Yeah, these estimates blew me away. &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;gencourt.state.nh.us&amp;#x2F;lsr_search&amp;#x2F;billText.aspx?id=188&amp;amp;type=4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;gencourt.state.nh.us&amp;#x2F;lsr_search&amp;#x2F;billText.aspx?id=188...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;I guess there are all kinds of aspects of the government I&amp;#x27;m not even aware of, but still... Everything I see is always browser-based with maybe some PDFs. What even is &amp;quot;NH FIRST (statewide ERP)&amp;quot;? Why does the general public interact with an ERP at all? I&amp;#x27;m assuming this bill means that individuals should not be compelled to use proprietary software, but if it includes businesses also then the price tag makes more sense.</text></comment>