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Your Tax Dollars Buying Open Source Software

Posted by timothy on from the once-they-have-the-money dept.

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?

2 of 182 comments (clear)

  1. Tax Deductible Donations == Subsidy by 4of12 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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."
  2. The Goverment invented OSS -- sort of...... by bdsesq · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.