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New York City Should Endorse the UN Open Source Principles

To
The New York City Office of Technology & Innovation
From
The undersigned
Re
Endorsing the United Nations Open Source Principles and making a transition to open source a goal of New York City government

Dear Chief Technology Officer,

Every June, the United Nations convenes UN Open Source Week at its Headquarters — here, in New York City. It gathers more than 2,600 participants from over 120 countries: the governments, institutions and builders organizing the world’s transition to open source. New York provides the stage. City government should join what happens on it.

The case is practical, not ideological:

  • The city rents proprietary software at enormous scale. Two citywide IT purchasing contracts are being put in place right now — $1.2 billion with SHI and $800 million with CDW — and the Comptroller found nearly $4 billion in master-agreement spending whose records reveal almost nothing about what was bought.
  • Government programs run on software. When the city can’t change the software, it can’t change the program — every new idea becomes a change order, priced by the only vendor who can implement it.
  • Open code can be audited by inspection, extending the trust the city already builds through its Vulnerability Disclosure Program from policy to proof.
  • Software adopted or built openly can serve all 130-plus city agencies at no additional licensing cost — the first agency solves the problem, every other agency inherits the solution.

New York already lives by this instinct for data: the Open Data Law has made publication the default since 2012. The step before you extends the same standard to code.

The eight principles

The UN Open Source Principles — endorsed in March 2025 by seventeen organizations, from the Open Source Initiative to the Linux Foundation — are:

  1. Open by default — open source as the standard approach for projects.
  2. Contribute back — active participation in the open source ecosystem.
  3. Secure by design — security as a priority in all software projects.
  4. Foster inclusive participation and community building — inclusive participation and community building.
  5. Design for reusability — interoperable across platforms and contexts.
  6. Provide documentation — thorough documentation for end users.
  7. RISE (recognize, incentivize, support and empower) — recognize, incentivize, support, and empower communities.
  8. Sustain and scale — solutions that meet evolving needs over time.

The ask

We respectfully call on the Office of Technology & Innovation to:

  1. Endorse the UN Open Source Principles, publicly and by name.
  2. Establish an Open Source Program Office (OSPO) to facilitate adoption across city government — coordinating what the city uses, what it publishes, how it contributes back, and how it stays secure doing so.
  3. Evaluate an open source alternative in every city technology contract, so no proprietary license is signed or renewed without first asking whether an open solution would serve New Yorkers better.

None of this requires new technology — the tools exist, and peer governments run them today. It requires a decision: that the city hosting the world’s open source movement should also run on it.

Respectfully, the undersigned