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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.
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.
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
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
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:
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 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 said: "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."
It is fairly well spelled out in the article, "DevIS does not "Sell Open Source." It sells solutions and applications that meet specification laid down by clients. Often, in the case of Federal sites and online database applications, those specs have to do with accessibility and security, but as long as they are met, Gallagher says, no one really needs to care about what's on the back end as long as whatever it is does the job and can be easily maintained after it is built. If the most cost-effective solution is Open Source, great. If not, Gallagher is not dogmatic. He points out repeatedly that Open Source and proprietary applications can coexist on a server and work together without any problems, and that if his clients require a proprietary application for a specific purpose, that's fine with him."
I realize that was an attempt to be funny about the $600 toilet seats, but that shouldn't be taken lightly. I've worked with a lot of people that were defense contractors at some point in their life and they get really touchy when people start saying blanket statements about things like this. Just because a few people/companies were guilty of this doesn't mean that they all are crooked.
"Everybody knows the moon's made of cheese," Wallace.
Doesn't ninenine.com "repackage someone else's" content to create a "Free Porn" site? Doesn't your stated philosophy here say you should be hiring/paying the, uhh, content providers?
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.
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.
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."
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
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
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.
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.
A word about defense contracting, any product you supply the government most likely has a detailed MIL-SPEC (Military Specification). One of the many DFARS (Defense Federal Acquisition Regulations Supplement ) you contractually agree to is documentation of your compliance with any and all specifications. So consider the lowly toilet seat.
There is probably a MIL-SPEC related to acceptable materials - now you need to test and document the source
Is it on an combat aircraft - then there are MIL-SPECs relating to the explosive combatibility, breakability, and maximum static charge buildup allowed.
When you start to look at all of the required documentation and testing, and the time involved the price gets up there - especially when the lowley $20/hr technician can be billed to the government at $90/hr ($20 + 300% Overhead + allowable Profit ~7% (of the gross!))
As a point of refernce the MIL-SPEC for a 13in antenna for use in the 420 to 460 megacycles per second range is 7 pages long, and references 10 other MIL-SPECs as well.
The really sad thing is that Home Depot probably has a better profit margin on their toilet seats than General Dynamics did.
Truth: If it's not one thing, it's another
General Dynamics made some pretty decent money selling $600 toilet seats to the government,
.00 for that tool plus materials. I knew a machinist that charged $100.00 per hour for mill work, so it wouldn't take long to rack-up $300.00. That dosen't even take into account exotic materials.
My father worked for GD in Ft.Worth, He told me about a $300 screwdriver a sub-contractor made. The reason for the outragous price was that they charged for all of the R&D time to design the thing and the time it took to frabricate it. When you take into account the machine time and the cost of the design work I'm amazed they could do it that cheap. Thats not to say that the Gov. dosen't get overcharged for things, just that it might not always be as bad as it seems.
I've built special tools back when I worked as a line mechanic. I made $25.00 per hour flat rate, if I spent 2 hours making the tool it cost me $50
I've always seen the toilet seat example and wondered what the whole story was. I figure that it was a price based on a small number of seats that were designed for a specfic location like an aircraft. Required to meet Mil. Specs. and one from the local Home Despot wouldn't work. For the price I'll bet it's Aluminum (Brrr) and with a short run, mostly hand made.
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..."
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!
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.
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
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?"
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...
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.