4 ms·

Based on my experience as a government contractor I have to say I think the government taking taxpayers money and funding open source infrastructure would be a

Based on my experience as a government contractor I have to say I think the government taking taxpayers money and funding open source infrastructure would be a terrible idea. What the government should do however is release all software it develops or pays to have developed from scratch as FOSS excluding sensitive defense systems and the like of course.

ci5er 11y ago
Interesting. I believe that VistA's (VA Hospital EHR) was originally open sourced because of a FOI filing. And then they (more-or-less) got behind it seriously. Contrary to the title of this posting, in 2005-or-so, there was more than one company formed around commercializing VistA that pulled down venture funding. Draper-Fisher-Jurvetson funded one, and I forget the other... But this was strictly a "toss over the wall" kind of deal. No community edits or changes ever make it upstream. Is that the kind of thing you are talking about, or would you envision a structure where improvements were re-absorbed into the borg?
- vanattab 11y ago
  While I think it would be nice if community changes make it upstream so the government can benifit from the changes this is not the motivating factor. The motivating factor in my mind is that taxpayers paid for the code they should have the rights to use it. Already if the code is written by a government employee it is in the public domain because the government can't copyright. But in the public domain is not the same thing as publicly available. There have been cases were government employees have written a code base then hired contractors to work on the code and sell the product back to the government at crazy prices. And then when the government wants the source code make a change they can't get because the code base is now proprietary. And the government is forced to pay the contractor outrageous sums to make a change to what originally was the government's code.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]

ci5er 11y ago

Interesting. I believe that VistA's (VA Hospital EHR) was originally open sourced because of a FOI filing. And then they (more-or-less) got behind it seriously. Contrary to the title of this posting, in 2005-or-so, there was more than one company formed around commercializing VistA that pulled down venture funding. Draper-Fisher-Jurvetson funded one, and I forget the other... But this was strictly a "toss over the wall" kind of deal. No community edits or changes ever make it upstream. Is that the kind of thing you are talking about, or would you envision a structure where improvements were re-absorbed into the borg?

vanattab 11y ago
While I think it would be nice if community changes make it upstream so the government can benifit from the changes this is not the motivating factor. The motivating factor in my mind is that taxpayers paid for the code they should have the rights to use it. Already if the code is written by a government employee it is in the public domain because the government can't copyright. But in the public domain is not the same thing as publicly available. There have been cases were government employees have written a code base then hired contractors to work on the code and sell the product back to the government at crazy prices. And then when the government wants the source code make a change they can't get because the code base is now proprietary. And the government is forced to pay the contractor outrageous sums to make a change to what originally was the government's code.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]