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Government-Funded GPL Software
tgw writes "Tom Adelstein has an article in 'Linux Journal' on how a major milestone in US government-funded OSS recently passed - virtually unnoticed." Slashdot has mentioned this company earlier.
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...with some software. I mean, look at it this way, a LOT of R&D and coding time can go into a piece of software and who better to fix the bugs and modify (in a positive manner) than the public. In addition to the fact that it won't cost the government shit to let the public find all the holes and patch them up so they don't have to [spend money doing so themselves].
So I guess the cliche applies here:
1. Government Funded GPL project
2. Unleash on public
3. ???
4. Profit!
Whether this is good or not, someone, within 30 comments of this post will post a jab at Bush.
schild
editor, f13.net
That is part of the benifit of it being GPL'd. While the government is "involved" in the production of the software, once it has been released, the only way they have more control over it than anyone else is that they own the copyright. And DRM under GPL liscensing is impractical enought to be funny.
This post written under Gentoo-linux with an SCO IP license.
But now the Linux kernal will be rewritten in ADA!
What about hardware? I'd really love to try one of those F-22's....
I think that all publicly funded software (except that with a security concern) should be released under the GPL. The people paid to have it made, the people should be the ones to benefit from it.
The preceding message was based on actual events. Only the names, locations and events have been changed.
What about SELinux? I belive the NSA paid for its development and it is GPL'd.
This post written under Gentoo-linux with an SCO IP license.
or is it inexpressibly sad that this ISN'T a no-brainer? That so many people apparently have no problem with the government taking our tax money and using it to fund projects that never see the light of day? Whatever the government uses my money for, unless releasing it endangers national security, it SHOULD be released for the public to use. We paid for it, after all. And the private sector can undoubtedly come up with applications for it the government didn't think of. Everybody wins.
Bush: He's Liberal in all the wrong ways.
Govt should fund open source SW, as closed source SW vendors will use their power and money to create laws that will close down OSS. That is really the blind spot of libertarians, free traders, etc--they fail to see to see how the so-called "free maeket" is really just a license to allow wealthy entities (e.g., corporations, etc) to manipulate and control lesser entities (i.e., all the rest of us so-called "humans".) If we want an increasingly high standard of living, then we have to engineer a government that will give it to us. Govt is just a machine. Designing machines has NEVER been easy. There aint no such as a free lunch, and a free market is certainly no free lunch, although it comes pretty close to that for corporations and the wealthy and upper income class.
Homo Sapiens Americanus--A documentary in p
But can't this be said about public domain as well? In that case businesses take GPL code that all people paid for, modify it, profit from selling the binaries of the derivative and (possibly) not disclosing their new source? If businesses don't cooperate, people and the government then lose money. GPL then would be better for government and the people. I'll stick to the FSF on this: GPL gives better protection, unless there is a specific reason to opt for LGPL or public domain.
As the article states, the government is supposed to be required to put out code in the 'public domain', it appears they had to use a loophole in the law to get this done.
Perhaps an exception for the LGPL would work here. The code could be used with commericial products while still keeping with the copy-left philosophy.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
Yeah but firstly, the US government aids and abets proprietary software, which is much MORE restrictive than the GPL, so whining about the GPL without complaining about them is major-league hypocritical, and secondly, the GPL doesn't stop anyone profiting from the software, including companies, it just stops people profiting with certain types of business model that abuse people's freedom.
The first GPL required US government funded project I know of is the NYU GNAT project which is an Ada GCC front-end, see History in Wikipedia
This was back in 1994 or some such.
Laurent
laurent@guerby.net
Wow, it sounds like you think its unpatriotic to release code under a license that doesn't restrict uses to the US.
How might things have turned out differently if those foreigners that started the Linux kernel, Mysql, OpenBSD, Python, Ruby, KDE, Mplayer, etc had said the same thing about letting American's profit off of their software.