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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?
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.
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
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.
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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.
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.
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This isn't someone repackaging someone else's work. Free software is great, but you have to have someone install, configure, and maintain that software. As a taxpayer, what bill would you rather the gov't pay...
Labor: $500,000
Hardware: $1,500,000
Software Licenses: $3,500,000
or
Labor: $500,000
Hardware: $1,500,000
Software Licenses: Free
Where have you been the last 10 years? The bad guys are no longer communists . Now we call them terrorists .
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!
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.