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.

Comments

Re:Open Source Troll much?

[Anonymous Coward]

I only say this because there is an obvious 'zomg go open source' vibe to the post...

+1 and this is why I stopped frequenting /. as often as I used to.
The Apply fanoboi's, MS-haters and oper-source zealots coupled with obvious product placement stories and instances of posspoor editor-oversight (same story appearing multiple tiems over a few weeks) means I now mostly use main-stream news/media - and filter out the crap there myself.

Re:Open Source Troll much?

[Bert64]

If a number of different governments, or different government agencies get together (or even with other non government organisations) and develop software jointly, the individual cost will be much less...
One of the main benefits of open source is that you don't need to fund all of the development yourself, other people will have similar requirements and you can share the development costs. This is exactly how commercial software works too, only in the commercial case you have an extra non essential middleman between end users and developers who wants to make a very large profit.