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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?
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:
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 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.
If your question is, how does this activity support companies that can't create a sustainable business model for their open source software product and/or service (not suggesting this describes Apache), well... it doesn't. I don't necessarily know that I want my tax dollars heading that direction anyway.
If your asking, how does this support the open source software movement in general, well, lots of ways. Open source developers are likely to contribute to and enrich the public code base, since they use it to create their own software, even if they are creating something so specific or odd that their particular project isn't really adding to the public pool of code. I've never met anyone using open source in their professional life who wasn't an enthusiast and contributor to noncommercial open source movement, so the simple fact that an employer is putting food on the tables of open source enthusiast programmers will tend to enrich the movement. And it all gives open source legitimacy and a toehold in the government.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
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."
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
This isn't what they're doing. They're using open source software as a framework for the software they produce, which probably is not open source. If I use JBoss and Apache to serve my web application, that does not mean that the web app the I wrote is open source.
You're supporting open source by using it, and possibly submitting bug reports or fixes that you find in the process of using it. As for actual financial contributions, that's probably not happening.
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.
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.
This is being shortsighted. It assumes that the only way resources are granted to something is by a direct line of money/developers and this is just not the way ANTY economy works (and many people seem to make this mistake).
For isntance, if this increases apache's user base by even 1% and adds a layer of legitimacy do you really think apache will see nothing from this? Sure if the govt stamped thier money with "tax dollar" on it apache would see none but thier income would still increase: A larger user base will do that. It will increase developers, the more popular the software the more people who will want to write for it.
Next is open source as a whole. Large portions of the Govt have been really deriding free software (while large portions also support it). That makes a dent in the over all adoption of open source apps (the govt says it's unsafe so it must be). Publicity of a somewhat trusted body means more people willing to try some of it, if what they get works well (and apache does) it makes it much easier to switch them. Stuff like this really helps the pointy hair type fell more confortable with a switch.
And in the end publicity will generate MCUH more money than a direct line through this company ever would.
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...