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?

Comments

whitehouse.gov and cl-httpd

[kwoo]

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.

Tax Deductible Donations == Subsidy

[4of12]

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].

Simple

[mao che minh]

I don't see why some people would see this as an issue at all. This company here uses open source code to get a job a done. This job just happens to be for the United States government. Whoop-de-doo.

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.

The Goverment invented OSS -- sort of......

[bdsesq]

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.

Re:I'd rather see...

[mt_nixnut]

Maybe I got lost in this thread somehow. but...

exactly why doesn't the work these guys do to produce solutions count as production? and how is a complete solution to a specified problem(need) without value? Open source is a large collection of unrealated works. Production in this context is turning the raw material (OSS) into marketable products. Think about the difference between iron ore and punch presses and cars. I think you would call a building a car production no? How is taking the raw material of OSS and making it into a solution different if someone needs it?

If you are making the point that only things like real estate and gold have real value ok. But in the everyday world of common idioms. People pay for the things they need. And value is a measure of satifaction with the solution.

my $.02