4 ms·

You are the leader in your segment of the market one day and the undisputed leader. You wake up and the NSA decides to send a free competitor out with better or

You are the leader in your segment of the market one day and the undisputed leader. You wake up and the NSA decides to send a free competitor out with better or matching functionality. Tough blow. But good for us.

Tepix 8y ago
I'm surprised that noone is yelling "socialism" yet. Tax paid competition for existing commercial products. Isn't that considered evil/wrong by pure capitalists?
- dang 8y ago
  "Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - ngold 8y ago
    Thanks for the link. That's a great reference point I did not know about.
  - ddtaylor 8y ago
    OP does have a point that this software was subsidized by tax payers. One could argue the NSA needs advanced tools and that the costs of IDA Pro add up.
    - woodman 8y ago
      This, unfortunately, occurs so infrequently that it can safely be ignored by 99.9% of the economy. Businesses have really enjoyed having their cake and eating it too with the transition away from a highly involved acquisition process that generally resulted in a tailored solution that the USG owned, to the present COTS policy that allows them to then go on to sell software to people that have already effectively paid for it through taxes. While there was an impressive amount of bureaucracy and an infinitely self referential system of standards in the old method, it did lead to some pretty interesting side effects: Ada[0], IDEF[1], MIL-STD-498[2], etc. The most recent liberation of useful taxpayer funded software that I can think of was over ten years ago, when NIST released NFIS2 - the fingerprint software that the FBI relied on. They of course had to be crappy about it and wrap it in export controls that limited its utility, but it was interesting to see all the work that internal development had done - very polished, with man pages going back to '97. Ah the memories: software classified as munitions, the clipper chip... [0] http://archive.adaic.com/pol-hist/policy/naig94-1.txt http://archive.adaic.com/pol-hist/policy/naig94-1.txt [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDEF#The_IDEF_modeling_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDEF#The_IDEF_modeling_languag... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIL-STD-498 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIL-STD-498 [3] https://web.archive.org/web/20041206072946/http://fingerprint.nist.gov/NFIS/index.html https://web.archive.org/web/20041206072946/http://fingerprin...

Tepix 8y ago

I'm surprised that noone is yelling "socialism" yet. Tax paid competition for existing commercial products. Isn't that considered evil/wrong by pure capitalists?

dang 8y ago
"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- ngold 8y ago
  Thanks for the link. That's a great reference point I did not know about.
- ddtaylor 8y ago
  OP does have a point that this software was subsidized by tax payers. One could argue the NSA needs advanced tools and that the costs of IDA Pro add up.
  - woodman 8y ago
    This, unfortunately, occurs so infrequently that it can safely be ignored by 99.9% of the economy. Businesses have really enjoyed having their cake and eating it too with the transition away from a highly involved acquisition process that generally resulted in a tailored solution that the USG owned, to the present COTS policy that allows them to then go on to sell software to people that have already effectively paid for it through taxes. While there was an impressive amount of bureaucracy and an infinitely self referential system of standards in the old method, it did lead to some pretty interesting side effects: Ada[0], IDEF[1], MIL-STD-498[2], etc. The most recent liberation of useful taxpayer funded software that I can think of was over ten years ago, when NIST released NFIS2 - the fingerprint software that the FBI relied on. They of course had to be crappy about it and wrap it in export controls that limited its utility, but it was interesting to see all the work that internal development had done - very polished, with man pages going back to '97. Ah the memories: software classified as munitions, the clipper chip... [0] http://archive.adaic.com/pol-hist/policy/naig94-1.txt http://archive.adaic.com/pol-hist/policy/naig94-1.txt [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDEF#The_IDEF_modeling_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDEF#The_IDEF_modeling_languag... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIL-STD-498 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIL-STD-498 [3] https://web.archive.org/web/20041206072946/http://fingerprint.nist.gov/NFIS/index.html https://web.archive.org/web/20041206072946/http://fingerprin...