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Government Funds Secret Sustainable Computing

Posted by Hemos on from the getting-the-money-in dept.

SEWilco writes "OSDN's NewsForge reports that Carnegie Mellon University has started a Sustainable Computing Consortium to improve the quality and security of software. The only news release is that NASA gave CMU $23 million to help create dependable software. SCC members get an internal-use license for SCC software. So taxpayers are paying millions to create proprietary software, and companies get access for a few thousand dollars. (There is some blurring between CMU's SCC and CMU's High Dependability Computing Consortium, although HDCC's web site has been idle for a year.)"

2 of 192 comments (clear)

  1. Free the software by jhoger · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Non-classified government funded software should be Free for public use, I guess is the point here. Are there any ongoing lobbying efforts to this effect?

  2. Public funds should equal public source. by rushfan · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If the software is written using public funds (i.e. my tax dollars are paying for this), then the resulting software should be publically available. Either under a GPL type license or under a BSD sytle license (with a BSD license, then even companies could incorporate the publically funded technology into their products to sell, sorta giving them something back for their tax dollars). Either way, if we paid [taxes] for it, then it should be available to us.

    Maybe we could get a bill passed that states all software not written for national security that is paid for by taxes should be open to the tax payers. Just a thought.