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Belief
When a government pays to have software built for public services, its source code should, by default, be made public for anyone to read. 0.50 Agree Disagree
If you disagree, this page has a column for you. A study, record or dataset for “Taxpayers paid for the software that runs government services, so they should be able to see what it does, in the same way they can read the laws it enforces”, which rests on argument alone.
Argument TreesHow arguments are scored →
Reasons to agree
Reasons to disagree
Weight for 0.00 · weight against 0.00 · net +0.00
Each reason is a claim with its own page. Score = sign x (2 x Truth - 1) x Conf x Link x Imp x Uniq, and every column is here so the row can be multiplied out and checked. A reason argued false scores negative and counts against the side it is filed on; a reason nobody has argued yet scores exactly 0, and so does one whose own page has no work behind it.
What Would Change the AnswerTruth scores →
Every claim beneath this page held at false and then at true, one at a time, with the whole graph recomputed each time. "If false" and "if true" are where this page’s truth score lands; "Move" is how far apart they are. "If settled" is that same distance with the input’s confidence held at 1, which is what it would be worth once the work behind it is finished, so the gap between Move and If settled is the value of doing that work. This is one input at a time and finds single points of failure; it does not test several inputs moving together, which is how correlated assumptions actually fail.
Related Beliefs
- Phone makers should be allowed to require that every app on their devices pass through an app store they review. 0.50
- When a government pays to have software built for public services, its source code should, by default, be made public for anyone to read. (this page)
The other beliefs filed under Software; this one is listed unlinked.
Not filled in yet
| Evidence Ledger | no findings cited yet |
| Falsifiability Test | nothing named that would strengthen or weaken this belief if it turned up |
| Testable Predictions | nothing stated that we should observe if this belief is true or false |
| Objective Criteria | no yardstick both sides would accept in advance has been proposed |
| What Acting On This Would Cost and Gain | no costs or benefits priced yet |
| Logical Anatomy | the claim has not been split into its component parts |
| Interests, Not Positions | nobody has mapped who wants what, or why |
| Media Resources | no books, studies or films weighed |
| Legal Framework | no laws or rulings cited |
| General to Specific | not linked to broader or narrower beliefs |
Parts of the template nobody has filled in here. They are named rather than shown, because an empty table is not a finding, and each one is a reason the confidence above is not higher. A part that takes rows has a form for its first one.
What this page needs right now
| # | The gap | Where it goes | Who is best placed to fill it |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | A study, record or dataset for “Taxpayers paid for the software that runs government services, so they should be able to see what it does, in the same way they can read the laws it enforces”, which rests on argument alone | Evidence Ledger | anyone with the source |
| 2 | A measurement both sides would accept in advance, with the reading each side predicts | Objective Criteria | anyone who can name a yardstick the other side would sign |
Named gaps, read off the tables above, so a newcomer can see exactly where a contribution goes. None of them requires agreeing with the page, and each one links to the form it goes in.
What the numbers are made of
- Share on the agree side
- no scored weight either way
- Confidence
- 32%. Weakest parts: scrutiny 0% · grounding 0%
- Depended on
- ReasonRank 0.0033, 128 of 2173
- Strongest reason for
- Taxpayers paid for the software that runs government services, so they should be able to see what it does, in the same way they can read the laws it enforces. +0.00
- Strongest reason against
- Publishing the code behind government software shows attackers exactly where to look, and government systems are targets that cannot afford to give their enemies a head start. -0.00
- What would move this most
- Settling Taxpayers paid for the software that runs government services, so the…: 0.50 if false, 0.50 if true
- Coverage
- Of 6 scored rows, 6 have no linkage page, 6 have no importance page, 6 have no uniqueness page. This page reads 6 other pages. 6 of them are one-sided or empty: Taxpayers paid for the software that runs government services, so they should be able to see what it does, in the same way they can read the laws it enforces.; Bugs and security flaws in government software are found faster when its code is public and many outside eyes can look, and a hidden flaw in a tax or benefits system harms real people.; When one government agency publishes the code for its software, another agency can reuse it instead of paying a vendor to build the same thing again.; Publishing the code behind government software shows attackers exactly where to look, and government systems are targets that cannot afford to give their enemies a head start.; Companies that build software for government often reuse the same code for other clients, and a rule forcing it open shrinks the pool of willing suppliers.; Preparing government software code for public release costs staff time that could instead go to improving the public service the software runs..
- Bottom line
- The disagreement turns on whether public scrutiny of code makes it safer and cheaper, or whether it mainly helps attackers and scares off the vendors government relies on.
Structural Checks
| Finding | How serious | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Nothing stated would show it false | a note | No testable prediction is listed, so as written there is no observation that would count against this belief. |
Faults the shape of the argument can show without reading a word of it: a claim used to support itself, a conclusion listed among its own premises, the same page counted twice. None of these changes a score. The wiki also specifies pattern-matching the prose for ten named fallacies; that is deliberately not done here, because a matcher looking for “attacking the person rather than the argument” would fire on the central legitimate argument on this whole site, and a score moved by a regular expression has no page to appeal to.
Scoring EngineTruth scores →
| Quantity | Value | How |
|---|---|---|
| Argument score | +0.00 | argument rows: weight for minus weight against |
| Evidence score | +0.00 | evidence rows: weight for minus weight against |
| Prediction contribution | +0.00 | prediction rows, same signed formula as every other row |
| Belief score | +0.00 | the three lines above added together |
| Positive total | 0.00 | every row whose signed contribution came out positive, from either side |
| Negative total | 0.00 | every row whose signed contribution came out negative, as a magnitude |
| Starting point | 0.50 | where this claim starts before any of its own rows count: Nothing observed: no source type recorded, so this claim starts at a coin flip |
| Weight of the starting point | 1.00 | k x a bounded reward for independent replication, k = 1, capped at 2.0 x k |
| Truth score, argued | 0.50 | (positive + weight x starting point) / (positive + negative + weight) |
| Truth score | 0.50 | argued truth, capped by the weakest load-bearing component that has its own page |
| ReasonRank | 0.0033 | how much of the site depends on this page: rank 128 of 2173. The share of a walk that starts at the 162 beliefs and steps to the pages they read, with a 0.85 chance of stepping on each time |
| Work value | 0.0023 | ReasonRank x (1 - confidence): how much settling this page would be worth to everything above it |
| Completeness | yes | at least one scored reason on each side (an importance page: at least one interest; an interest page: both readings filled) |
Cite this page When a government pays to have software built for public services, its source code should, by default, be made public for anyone to read. Idea Stock Exchange, belief page when-government-pays-have, truth 0.50, confidence 32%, revision 42c8344 of 2026-10-04. The revision is what makes this quotable: these numbers move as the argument is worked on, and rebuilding that revision reproduces them exactly.
Every number on this page as data: when-government-pays-have.json. Constants: K = 1 · UNARG = 0.5 · DEFLINK = 1 · DEFIMP = 0.5 · DEFUNIQ = 1. A reason placed under a conclusion is presumed relevant until a linkage page says otherwise; the burden is on the challenger. The neutral start for importance, the wiki's own rule.
Every value here is computed from the tables above at build time. Nothing is typed.