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US Military Settles Software Piracy Claims For $50M
Rambo Tribble writes "The BBC reports that the U. S. government has agreed to pay software maker Apptricity $50 million to settle claims that the U.S. Army pirated thousands of copies of the firm's provisioning software. The report indicates 500 licensed copies were sold, but it came to light an army official had mentioned that 'thousands' of devices were running the software." $50 million in tax money could have paid for a whole lot of open source software development, instead.
$50 million in tax money could have paid for a whole lot of open source software development, instead.
Bullshit. A government designed website cost over $600 million, for $50 million you only get the committee that argues about the design, and only for a year or so.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
they also require the source code be distributed, so the program is essentially gifted to the US army's enemies...
I don't know of a single OSS license that requires distribution of source to anybody except recipients of binary versions (who, one hopes, the Pentagon would check for friendliness before sending software to, not that we have a terribly good track record on that...) It's commonly more widely distributed than that, for convenience or philanthropic reasons; but it would be perfectly doable to keep even an aggressively GPLed project in-house/among close collaborators only, with the only caveat being that you'd need to be using only LGPL or less encumbered external components.
Software (and any other copyrightable work) developed directly by an employee of the US Government is, unless it qualifies to be secret, required to be released into the Public Domain, which means that you can't even attach the limited restrictions of a permissive/promiscuous license like BSD to it.