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> Isn't the point that the contact should have a non-negotiable OSS clause of it's using public funds. Okay. Say you're a vendor for student information syste

> Isn't the point that the contact should have a non-negotiable OSS clause of it's using public funds. Okay. Say you're a vendor for student information systems. It handles registration, enrollment, scheduling, attendance, report cards, state and federal reporting, teacher gradebooks, parent portal, etc. You sell your product to one school district with 800 students for an initial fee of $100,000 plus an annual fee of $5 per student and $10,000 for up to X hours of direct support (note: these numbers are not far off the actual costs). Except now it's open source, and every one of the hundreds of thousands of school districts in the country suddenly has access to your software without charge. Sure, you can come up with dozens of reasons why that's great for schools, but you're the SIS vendor that just spent a couple million dollars producing the software. Why would you be in a business where the moment you sell your product, you can no longer sell your product? Support? Okay, but you'll immediately be competing with other support vendors, etc.

gizmo686 8y ago
What does it mean to be funded "with public money". In your example, it sounds like the software was funded with private money then sold as a product to the schools. The relevant scenario is that the school approached the company and paid them to develop the software.
- da_chicken 8y ago
  That's a fair point. I hadn't thought of it that way, it's just what I went to because it's what I'm used to thinking in terms of.
  - gizmo686 8y ago
    Its still not as clear cut as I make it sound. Another potential model is for the government to partially fund development. For instance, if the government wants a piece of software that costs $1,000,000 to develop, a company might offer to develop it for them for $500,000 and the rights to resale it to other customers. This isn't an intractable problem though. You would just need to make a clear delimination between what components the government is paying for, and which ones is coming out of the company's R&D budget. Due to billing, this is already how many of these projects work, but the publicly funded portion is often far less useful without the privately funded portion; and there often is not a good solution to this (think a government funded plugin to Microsoft Excel, where an Excel license costs $5,000)
Godel_unicode 8y ago
You should Google redhat. Edit: or elastic. Or automattic. Or black duck, or canonical, or cloud bees...

gizmo686 8y ago

What does it mean to be funded "with public money". In your example, it sounds like the software was funded with private money then sold as a product to the schools. The relevant scenario is that the school approached the company and paid them to develop the software.

da_chicken 8y ago
That's a fair point. I hadn't thought of it that way, it's just what I went to because it's what I'm used to thinking in terms of.
- gizmo686 8y ago
  Its still not as clear cut as I make it sound. Another potential model is for the government to partially fund development. For instance, if the government wants a piece of software that costs $1,000,000 to develop, a company might offer to develop it for them for $500,000 and the rights to resale it to other customers. This isn't an intractable problem though. You would just need to make a clear delimination between what components the government is paying for, and which ones is coming out of the company's R&D budget. Due to billing, this is already how many of these projects work, but the publicly funded portion is often far less useful without the privately funded portion; and there often is not a good solution to this (think a government funded plugin to Microsoft Excel, where an Excel license costs $5,000)

Godel_unicode 8y ago

You should Google redhat. Edit: or elastic. Or automattic. Or black duck, or canonical, or cloud bees...