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Your Tax Dollars Buying Open Source Software
Roblimo has a story over at NewsForge about DevIS, a software company that relies on Free and open source software to not just weather but actually do well in the current software economy. Part of the reason may be that the company doesn't preach software philosophy; they just find that combining well-tested (and mostly GPL'd) software tools is the path of least resistance when it comes to building Internet applications. Most of their work is for the Federal government; always nice to see public dollars supporting public software. Can anyone point out other good examples of similar businesses?
then I have a nice bridge to sell them. Oh wait...
If I, Joe Anonymous Coward, sell the government a copy of Apache, I make money, Apacha does not. Unless I take that money and spend it on helping Apache, then it doesn't support them. That's a pretty big step.
I've finally found a reason to stop complaining that my tax money isn't being properly used. Now I'll happily pay my taxes!
---
IMHO, of course.
May the SOURCE be with you.
Your Tax Dollars Buying Open Source Software!!! more like celda
Does RMS' welfare cheques count as another example?
Trolling is a art,
Yahoo relies almos exclusively on open source and it's own software and it's more than survived the crunch
IIRC, General Dynamics made some pretty decent money selling $600 toilet seats to the government, though I think that selling free software to the government is infinitely better.
In seriousness, I REALLY hope such business do not include line items for free software on their bills to the government. (Microsoft's lackeys in Congress could have a field day with that.) Rather, all costs should be related to development, implemenation, etc of solutions...that just happen to utilize free software.
I think that the NSA's SE Linux helps us more; we are getting something for our tax dollars.
Is this company "better" because it redistributes OSS for cash? I see that as a necessity of making the software truly free, not as anything that can particularly help us.
M$ has been using OSS to make money for years, but where's their parade?
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Sadly it's the fortune 500 corporate america that has yet to embrace common sense and as they still feel the need to live by the "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" mindset which some see as a way to survive. Large corporations have very differnt forces driving them.
All the best,
--Bob
...my tax dollars supporting the economy better. Instead of going to a company that uses that money to grow, pay taxes, pay employees, and pay investors, tax money goes into a company that does little more than repackage somebody else's work. Not exactly a good return on tax dollars, in my opinion.
Now that we've publicized that DevIS is a bunch of communists, you can be sure that federal grants for this company will mysteriously dry up.
I'm much funnier now that I'm a subscriber.
I thought our tax dollars were used to market government-approved violent games to our nation's youth. Silly me, it's being used for the development and proliferation of OSS!
Why do I always feel like I'm waking up from a nightmare?
~D:
But we are embracing .net .. with a looming budget deficit, yet!
http://www.pub.whitehouse.gov used to run cl-httpd, an open source web server written in Common Lisp. I just checked the link and it's dead now, but according to NetCraft, www.whitehouse.gov is running an unknown web server on Linux.
unixkb.com -- articles on practical Unix issues.
My company, Sycamore Associates, does a good deal of government work, and we use OSS products whenever possible (including Linux, Apache, perl, and JBoss, among others). It seems, though, that it's easier to convince government clients to use these products when they're outsourcing and we agree to support the products - that way, it's transparent to them, and we take care of any problems.
What's harder is when we have subcontractors on site and we try to convince them to use these things internally. They're concerned that the subcontractors will move on and they'll be stuck with something they don't understand or know how to support. I suppose this is a valid concern, but a little education would go a long way to alleviate this.
Right now, I'm working as a subcontractor to Lockheed Martin on a NIMA contract. They still use Sun and SGI servers, but they run Apache, Tomcat, and Samba, as well as many GNU tools.
I'm the network admin for a city govt. We purchased copies of the above distros.
I don't give a flying fuck whether the software my tax dollars are buying is free or not. What I do care about if it's the right software for the job, and whether the government will be more effective as a result of buying this software. It is unwise (at best) to base your decisions solely on whether the software is open or not.
*
You will be silenced. And don't you ever say such things again, or we'll go after your family. Slashdot uber allies!
I work for a company, DigitalNet (previously Getronics Government Solutions), that does pretty much all its business with the government. In the consulting business, what matters is we get the job done, not how we do it. Traditionally, all the development was with commercial software tools and libraries but more and more open source is starting to creep in. In my current contract, 100% of the code is open source. The beauty of multi-platform code (in this case Java and ANSI SQL) is the core application can be integrated with commercial databases or run on a commercial application server (instead of the Tomcat I developed with). This allows me to distribute the app with OSS fully functional yet allow the client to replace key infrastructure with commercial software as desired.
:)
Projects like Struts, stxx, Lucene, JFreeChart, AspectJ, etc allow me to add tons of functionality without having to do anything. In only a few hours, I used Lucene to add the ability to search the entire database. Even better, when the client is willing and usually is, you can release any changes/fixes/improvements back into the project. My boss is convinced open source is going to be key going forward.
If you want to have a job programming open source software, this is a great field for it. BTW, thanks partially to the success of this contract, our next job ad features the preferred knowledge of open source technologies.
This was about linux I though.
Listen folks, the point of this company is not selling software, but services. If you would READ the article, you would see that. devIS is a services company. That's the whole point. They don't charge for the free software they use, but for the solutions the produce using these tools. For instance, you can't just hand the government a Zope server and expect it to do everything they want. Someone has to program it to do something relevant. This is what this company happens to do. Now, because they use free software, like Apache and Zope and Postgres, your tax dollars are saved from buying proprietary solutions that soon require costly upgrades and such. This money that is saved then can be pumped back into the economy elsewhere, whether to another contractor, or another economic program like finding some of these whiners jobs.
He's right you know. I work for HP and I can tell you that most people in my division make IT decisions based upon not screwing up rather than taking a risk and maybe doing something special. I'm guessing it's pretty much that way in most huge companies.
Just to restate the obvious, but if you donate some of your own money to a qualified 501(c)3 organization such as the Free Software Foundation, then, at least in the USA, you may deduct it on your tax return from your gross income.
So in that sense, the government is subsidizing open source software at whatever your marginal tax rate happens to be.
They're subsidizing a lot of other organizations that way, too, such as mortgage creditors, but I feel that the public investment in more and improved free software contributes more to the overall productivity of the economy [I'm sure realtors and home builders would dispute me].
"Provided by the management for your protection."
It makes no sense when you think about it, really. I mean, somethign must be up.
P/S is used by research labs all over the world, as well as by several DARPA funded projects in the US. The program manager (an official agent of the Man) has always been extremely cool about the OS nature of the project. He immediately understood that by staying OS we could pool the resources of hundreds of researchers, most of whom were not being paid by DARPA, to solve a pressing need for network-friendly robot interfaces and re-usable code. A good deal for everyone.
Making a buying decision solely on the openness of the software is probably a bad ideal. But open source has alot to offer that needs to be weighed against the advantages of proprietary software. In particular open source helps limit risk, if all else fails you can take the source and contract with a competitor to fix or change it. Too many software purchasing decisions are simply "Which software provides the best balance of functionality now for payment now?" completely ignoring future costs and risks. That's an equally foolish way to purchase software.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
neat company
I could go on and on about the benefits of open source, but we have all heard that arguement before, so here is just a real brief recap:
1. OSS is cheaper then proprietary, or free
2. Because it is open source, you can always have in-house people maintain it or hire someone else too. This longevity of the same product will save the tax payers even more money by avoiding upgrade cycles.
3. Because it is open source, you can integrate it into future projects easily.
4. Because of 2 and 3 above, you as a government entity are not chained to a single closed-sourced vendor with no control over products purchased with the public reserves.
Now, if it was proven DevIS were *terrorists*, we'd already be under a barrage of PSAs telling us open-source funds drug abuse or something.
"rtv" is actually our old nutjob friend, Mentifex!
now that's funny ;o)
President Bush: Let me get this straight, tax dollars that isn't going in our pockets?
Bill Gates: Unbelievable right?
President Bush: Even though I can not pronounce their name *giggle* hasn't stopped me in the past *giggle*, i'm still going to add this Deeev-ess to the Axis of Evil.Bill Gates: and make them run Windows? *fingers crossed*
President Bush: Yeah i'll make some sort of anti-terror law about free something or other.
I don't keep a lid on my coffee so when I walk around I look busy -me
I know this is going to be a popular post.
By law any software produced by tax dollars is available to a citizen for the cost of distribution. Classified stuff is obviously not available.
But if you want a copy of that Cobol program that calculated your income tax on a nice new 6250BPI tape just ask.
All of this predates GNU, copyleft and OSS by many years. So the government (Al Gore anyone?) can take credit for Open Source.
Where have you been the last 10 years? The bad guys are no longer communists . Now we call them terrorists .
Isn't the phrase "buying open source" an oxymoron?
Perhaps the ideal Open Source company is not a behemoth run by a ruthless, profit-driven executive, but is something like devIS, run by a Volvo-driving, former Peace Corps volunteer like Gallagher, who talks more about money he has saved taxpayers and how well the sites his company has made serve their intended constituencies than about the amount of money he has put in his (or investors') pockets.
..
Hey! Some of us like money, american muscle cars, tits, red meat, guns, AND Open Source thank you very much
We fund public schools. How much of your tax dollars ultimately end up in the hands of Microsoft? Is it necessary?
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Oh, cry me a river.
Most defense contracting is a rubber stamp process. Contractors get the MANDATORY yearly price increases, freely given by the gov't, then you have companies tack on extra in fees with little or no real accountability.
If Lockheed builds your F-16, you get the parts from them. If, for some reason, the price on an F-16 widget goes up 200% in one year, this is rarely challenged. The process to do so costs almost as much.
As a Navy boss once said, "Yeah, they got us on this one, but we'll get them on the BIG ones..." This was for a part that was elevated over 1000% in less than three years time. Total cost was over 10 million dollars. Big ones... Right.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Sun's Cobalt line of products (http://www.sun.com/hardware/serverappliances/) have been essentially selling Linux, Apache, etc for a few years now. And at LinuxWorld you couldn't throw a stick without hitting a tier 1 hardware company hocking an enterprise cluster solution built on top of Linux.
But many of those tier 1s - IBM, for example with its participation in Eclipse.org - are giving back to the open source community. And it makes perfect sense. They are moving hardware and service associated with their 'solutions'. There isn't much opportunity for margin for them in pushing Windows or a web server.
The company I work for (http://www.bugopolis.com) is selling application appliances which serve the open source bugzilla and gforge applications. So, we are an integrator of sorts concentrating on more specialized best-of-breed software development tools. Hopefully we are doing our bit to popularize open source software and it is our intention to contribute back to the projects we are using in our products.
This site is a dutch hosting company which only hosts websites for non-profit organisations. They only use open-source software to host those websites.
:).
I don't know whether it's because it saves a lot of money or that it's an idealistic point of view, but it certainly is a good example
Neelix.
Don't worry, it's all just 1's and 0's anyway...
Serously, they pay for what they can do for free?
NAI could have used the technology behind Deersofts software, SpamAssassin for free! But they still bought it.
How wierd. How do companies justify this stuff?
don't you people understand sarcasm!?
mod parent as funny or retake English 10
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
WARNING: WILD ASS GUESSES FOLLOW.
With 30+ employees (I'll assume 32.5 employees) and $4 million in revenue, that's $123,000 per employee.
Business owners know that your typical employee costs around 150% of their yearly salary. With that in mind, only $82,000 of your original $123,000 per employee is left.
But, wait! You haven't paid for their computers yet. Or the office space. Or the guy that empties the trash cans. Or electricity. Or the Internet connection (hey, browsing pr0n takes bandwidth, and bandwidth costs money!). And a million and one other things that we don't ever think about. Running a business COSTS MONEY.
I'll pull a number out of my and shave off another 25%. That leaves $61,500 per employee.
There's more! You damn well know the managers and executives are paying themselves a lot more than the slaves ^H^H^H^H^H^H developers.
At the end of the day, the developers are probably getting a well "below average" paycheck, and the company is probably barely getting by.
This is success? By some measures, YES.
BUT...forgive me if I'm NOT impressed. They probably won't be able to keep every employee busy 100% of the time (and you still have to pay idle employees -- at least, I assume they're salaried rather than hourly). If rough times hit this company, I'm willing to bet they don't have enough money in the bank to get by for long.
-Teckla
Don't we have enough parasites screaming for handouts without the government paying out money for that which is, by definition, free?
--sdem
This sounded like a great place to work until I saw what state it was located in. I know what most people in Virginia do for the feds and I don't want to work with them. Just look at the kind of trials they send there. Those people have a strong bias.
While I do not want to take away attention from open source software being used in mainstream business (or in this case public sector), I find that sometimes we hype too much over everything.
So what if a "web services" company is using open source software for the government. Open source has always been at the centre of web applications since the first script kiddie made a web site using Perl.
My own company has made banking applications using open-source technologies for years, no one's written an article on us.
The point is really: their is some good free open source software out there, and we (as it's supporters) must continue using, improving and recommending it in all our projects. The software will speak for itself!
Uses Linux "Almost" exclusively.
Only a small handfull of windows PC's.
The first person to actively sell Samba and support for Samba to the U.S. government in classified programs will make a ton of money. Veritas is trying this, but at least the Air Force has spent a ton of money on tools like Chameleon's NetManage NFS clients, which suck big time. Samba is the solution, but the government will not bite unless a U.S.-owned company with clearances will support the product.
Can I have my tax dollars back?
"Stop throwing the Constitution in my face, it's just a goddamned piece of paper!" - George W. Bush Nov. 2005
They are charging for implimentation.... there isn't anything wrong with that...
Did you even read the article? Do you have a brighter idea for how people should make a living off an essentially free product other then by providing support, custimization, and implimentation?
http://www.trustcommerce.com/opensource.php
What's been great lately, private companies are making use of open-source Win32 libraries, and are actively contributing to the pool of Win32 open source applications.
For examples, look at Indy and Turbopower . There's hundreds more...The main reason, in my mind at least, is that the MPL (Mozilla Public License) has opened up new ways of ensuring intellectual property remains secure, while allowing companies to make use of and develop open software as well.
My company, WDI, is a part of BNT (Brunswick New Technologies) which is Brunswick Corporation's high tech division. We have built an Java based EAI (App Integration) system and related tools using open source / GPL'd components.
Ant, Axis, Tomcat, Xerces, Xalan, Log4J, probably others.. from the Apache project are core components.
The system uses MySQL for its own persistence purposes (it can run on almost any SQL db, but we prefer MySQL)
Also, some experimental/newer components use Castor for XML marshalling/unmarshalling,
the JCSP package (Java Communicating Sequential Processes), JUnit for test first development.
When time permits or the need arises, I try to make useful contributions to the open source projects whos code we use. (finding bugs, making patches, etc..), which I think is the best way for developers to help open source software projects.
Butane.
By law any software produced by tax dollars is available to a citizen for the cost of distribution. Classified stuff is obviously not available.
NOT true! By law, any work created by the government is public domain, but a work for the government, even if paid for by the government, is not necessarily put in the public domain. That is one reason they are trying to get civil servants to write less software, and contractors to write more software (so that they can 'commercialize' the contractor made software.)
I work as a contractor, doing research and writing software that is paid for by government sources. Even though my company (typically) signs off the rights of my code to the government (it can be useful, but not really commercializable; just lots of research related code), it is QUITE a pain to get that code made available for public use (and it is NOT public domain, thanks to the wording of the law (title 19, or some such thing))
"It's overkill, of course. But you can never have too much overkill." - Anonymous Slashdot Coward
Oh, how cute! Another "Waste is good" economist.
From an economic standpoint, waste often is good. For instance, in retail products, more packaging means a more expensive product, and therefore increased revenue that produced it. Time wasted on contracts is often paid for by the principal -- translating into profit for the contractor. You see, waste increases the flow of capital in nearly every case. Of course, that doesn't make it right, just economically desirable. The social and environmental costs are tremendous, though, and far outweigh the economic benifit - IMHO.
And now to move back on topic. What you seem to be missing here is that many companies include open source software in their solutions. They don't charge for the inclusion of that software, just for the custom stuff they developed to work with the OSS stuff. Their customers are paying for custom solutions that build on this software, not for the (open source) software itself.
Here at the company I work for, we are developing web software that uses Linux, qMail, Apache, MySQL, Perl, and ColdFusion. We don't charge for any of those licenses except for the ColdFusion. We'd have to charge more if we went with Netscape iPlanet and Oracle.
So, we save money for our customers by saving on the cost of those liscenses. As for the ColdFusion, well, all of our developers are proficient in it and few are comfortable with the OSS app languages such as PHP and Perl (my personal preferences). Perhaps one day...
(Score: -1, Stupid)
"What were we before the 14th Ammendment? Yes, that's right, our rights were unalienable::not revokable, nor able to be abridged."
Hehe! Funny stuff.
No, your rights can be revoked after "due process of law". See the Fifth Amendment.
They can take your property away too (after giving you "just compensation" of course).
So you should say, "What were we before the 5th Amendment?"
What NAI bought was the ability to steer and effectively control the direction of SpamAssassin's development. They didn't purchase the ability to download or use the software, what they purchased was a stake in controlling the userbase.
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
Kitware www.kitware.com has received on the order of millions of dollars to develop three open-source systems: VTK, ITK, and CMake (vtk.org, itk.org, cmake.org). Sponsors are the US National Labs who are invsting to make VTK (the Visualization Toolkit) run on large parallel supercomputers; the National Library of Medicine who have funded the entire development of ITK (Insight Segmenation and Registration Toolkit); and both have helped fund CMake a cross-platform build management tool. BTW- we use a BSD-style license. GPL is an extreme license, it is not business friendly and comes with it's own strings attached. Strings mean limits on freedom...
How about profit. For example:
Proprietary Vendor:
Profit: $500,000
Labor: $500,000
Hardware: $1,500,000
Software Licenses (profit for someone else!): $3,500,000
or
Open Source Vendor:
Profit: somewhere between 500,000 and 4,000,000
Labor: $500,000
Hardware: $1,500,000
Software Licenses: Free
If it comes to a bidding war for a fixed priced project, the OS vendor should easily win and make more profit. The client pays less, the vendor makes more profit, and the tax payer saves money (I won't even get into government security:). If you do fixed price projects with proprietary software, someone else is eating your lunch!
I manage the IT department for $100M+ company - we use open source software extensively for business-critical applications and as a development platform. Doing so saves us a huge amount of money - funds that would otherwise be spent on proprietary systems, most likely produced by M$. We don't really contribute anything back to open-source developers (other than bug reports and occasional porting work) but I don't really feel bad about it since we are not actively supporting the commercial alternatives to open source products with our money and we are promoting the use of open source to both our employees and shareholders.
I think people are missing a big point, very very few companies are Homogeneous in the technology they use.
I work for Lincoln Laboratory and almost every project we do is for the DoD and is paid for by the federal government. The lab is broken into divisions then groups. My group not only uses windows and employs 2 Windows tech support people, but we also have our own solaris network that is bigger than the windows one and 1.5 full time admins.
My group is not alone, many others are similar in the group.
Just because a company uses Windows, doesn't mean they are devoid of *nix, and vice versa.
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
You have none to show. By the way, did I ever tell you about the gold mine that I sold to the government? It's called Alaska! Yeah, I once owned Alaska...before Russia stole it from under my feet, and then after the Civil War; the United States bought it from Russia at an inflated price to secretly compensate the Czar's kindness of stationing Russian troops off the coast of California in preparation to fight against the 8,000 British forces stationed in Canada to await the Union and Confederate armies of America to exhaust themselves and Britain to reclaim the rebel colonies.
I sware I'm not speculating, but if you read your history you will discover that I am correct. However, that is merely on what I am claiming and I can't point you to any reference supporting my claim. You have done the same. So, feh!
But I'm sure you already Gnu that.
We do work entirely for the government, especially for DARPA, the IRS and the FAA. A fair number of our projects involve, in whole or in part, software of an open source nature. Some of the stuff I have played with in the past, and even helped bug-fix or improve:
lame (think sonar), MySQL, samba (smbtar fixes, largefile fixes in client), octave and linux-wlan-ng.
Moreover, our infrastructure teams use OSS extensively. They have a corporate printing system built from LPRng, samba, openldap, and apache. Tons of perl glue. We have some wicked cool scripts for unix desktop users that automagically pick the closest printer to the user as the default.
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
No really, he was a guest speaker for us yesterday, out in our Washington site. Standing room only! :-)
Us MITRE techies are committed. (In more way than one...)
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
As is usual in these lists, no one is really answering the main posters question: what companies are successfully making a business with open source? IBM is. Not only is IBM contributing huge amounts of software ($40 million for Eclipse, XML4J, etc) to the open source world, they also use it in their projects or regular systems (for example, Ant is used to simplify WebSphere Commerce Suite build and deploy). Even better, they *make* software that runs on Linux, such as WebSphere, DB2, MQSeries, etc.
...always nice to see public dollars supporting public software.
But do the programmers who spend a lot of time on it see a dime?
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
Apple does a great job of that too.
every American's tax dollars have funded:
...television ...cross-atlantic telecommunications ...GPS
-the creation of the Internet
-the creation of Nylon (which led to velcro, etc.)
-the research that has gone into:
seriously....for the people who think that tax dollars going to Open Source is a bad thing...remember that ANY software written by a federal employee has, by law, to be entered into the public domain.
RTFA, I don't think their just burning them a CD with apache on it.
You're a small software company, you work hard as do your employees.
Your software is excellent, while the open source software is very good. When you innovate the open source team just copies what you did.
Now every year you pay taxes thereby supporting the open source guys and paying to make the competition better.
Do get me wrong I think open source has many advantages, but lost in the shuffle and hatred for MS, many small companies get run out of business.
If you pay me $4000 instead of $2000, the fact that I have that extra $2000 instead of you may end up having an effect on the economy, but whether that is good or bad, depends on how well I use that $2000 compared to how well you may have used it.
Then suppose it costs a printer $1 in raw materials to make a glossy colorful cardboard box, which they sell to me for for $5. I package the widget in the box and ship it to you, and you unwrap it, and get $0.10 worth of pleasure from seeing the pretty box, which you then throw away. $0.90 of capital has just been lost.
A more dramatic example of waste harming the economy was in the news a while back. Suppose an expensive office building is destroyed by terrorists. An insurance claim is filed and paid, and a while later, there is a great construction project to build a new office building. Lots of money is moving around, workers employed, taxes paid, etc. But surely the economy was nevertheless harmed by the destruction of capital (the office building), no? The value of the new building, minus whatever was lost to waste in its construction, might outweigh the value of the previous building, but probably not.
Waste almost(?) always involves the destruction of capital; that's why we call it waste. If it isn't destructive, we call it something else, perhaps "added value" or something like that.
Verily, I understand this. I flamed NineNine for not understanding it. It seems he would prefer that you hire extra people to reimplement those free tools, or buy commercial alternatives, in order "to grow, pay taxes, pay employees, and pay investors." I say it would be a waste to duplicate that effort, and you already know what I think of waste.As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I thought information wanted to be FREE!!
As if the $10,000 toilet seats and hammers weren't enough, now they're spending our money on things that don't cost a dime!
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
We are a company which is almost totally based on open-source software solutions. We are currently doing a nice size project for a government agency (who currently must remain nameless - no this is not defense related) which is all being done in Python and the Twisted Framework.
One issue we confront is that you have to have software tools that play nicely with all the legacy and Microsoft systems out there. Customers aren't going to throw out their existing investment in infrastructure. The open source model almost by definition guarantees that it is actually great for integration with the proprietary world. In fact, Python is especially so.
The other issue is convincing our customers to "give back to the community." At first they almost always say we have to own the IP. Then we explain to them that they aren't software companies so there is no value to them in that ownership. Then they worry about their competitors getting their hands on it (this isn't an issue obviously with government clients, but they still have hesitations.). In the end of the day, we always manage to educate them on the benefits they will derive in releasing as much as possible back to the open source community. We usually add a clause in the contract which gives them the right to exclude code from being open sourced, but they rarely invoke it. In more commercial environments, there may be proprietary ways of doing things embedded in the software, but that kind of stuff isn't usually amenable to opens sourcing in any case.
Bottom line: open source development is a business both in commercial and government sectors.
I'm not sure what you mean. If you'd read the post, you'd see that the word "weather" is used in the context of "weather the storm", a very common idiom among english-speaking people.
This might not been well received by SUN & co, since space programs have always been a fat niche market for them, but I think that they realise that if it wasn't Linux it would have been Windows (which also is gaining market share in this field, anyway), and they prefer Linux because they can still try to win back the customers.
Now, the space program money comes from tax-payers. I doubt free software programmers will see any of it, but companies like SuSE are getting more work, and this is something. Also, experienced Linux programmers can more easily find a job in the field (if they can stand it).
Ciao
----
FB
I do Apache web server training and support. By far, the largest percentage of people coming to training are from government and para-government organizations - National Guard, NSA, NASA, state government, and so on. And many of these places have been in the process of migrating from IIS to Apache, or, in a few cases, from Netscape to Apache. I don't know if this indicates a trend, but it certainly accounts for most of my company's bottom line.
Apache guy, Open Source enthusiast, runner
Good arguments. You made my friends list :)
(Score: -1, Stupid)
What's http://www.whitehouse.com running?
Why bother.
I work at a large company that is converting an existing e-commerce app to IBM WebSphere. I pushed for Linux, IBM pushed for AIX. They talked down Linux scalability, and basically spread open source FUD. There certainly are some people at IBM who support open source, but they don't work in sales.
Luckily, there are a lot of people in various governments who share your opinion.
I would like to assume you know a little about defense contracting, but in reality you could aquire everything you said from a few minutes of searching on google. I also want to apologise for being an anonymous coward, but the create account site is down and untill now I have never had anything I wanted to post.
Back to topic. Military specifications on an external antenna are entirely different than an internal toilet seat. First of all, the passing air particles on the outside of the ship are what cause static, (e.g. your antenna comment), but hardened plastic does not readily lose electrons or allow them to move, hence having little to no static charge. Here at 3M we often use the same types of plastic on electronic products we design. I want to assure you that Defense contractors lobby for their positions, contribute millions in soft money to campaigns and insure that they get all that buy in money back by over charging the government on products.
So in response, yes, all defense contractors are crooked. But hey, who wouldn't want to make more money, it's not like their robbing the american people or anything....oh wait, yeah they are.
IBM and three japanese computer corporations dropped about 4 billion dollars into Linux research, so quite honestly I hope they are going to be putting it as their primary server backbone Otherwise that's a lot of money to throw out the window.
You just drew a comparison between a corporation that takes free software, writes a wrapper for several programs throws in a cute GUI and resells it. to an Iron ore process, that would actually involve several companies. First the company that mines the ore, then they SELL it to someone else, the first company makes money and pays employees. It sells to another company that processes the ore into a metal, then they SELL their product pay their employees and such.
You see all this selling going on, with companies making money and paying employees. The software company we are talking about, isn't BUYing anything, they take software developed by people and invest no money in the company they took the software from. Then they resell it.
Do not make a open source hero out of these people. when they do actually improve open sourced code, they keep it in house I garantee it.
Oh that's right I saw him in downtown Flint yesterday where I live. You know he lives in a 30,000$ house in the inner city. give me a break, just cause he drives a volvo doesn't mean he isn't profit driven, now if he drove an 89 tempo like me I would be impressed. He was in the peacecorps, well good for him, Bill Gates was a boy scout.
they program for fun. get over it