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What if the government can get better capability out of a SaaS product paid for by private capital than they can out of something they build themselves? Are we

What if the government can get better capability out of a SaaS product paid for by private capital than they can out of something they build themselves? Are we saying government's should just be locked into single-build custom software for all eternity? A single piece of software can be used by multiple different governments... In which case no one government has "paid for it". In that scenario, how is a government any different to any other B2B customer?

rad_gruchalski 4y ago
> What if the government can get better capability out of a SaaS product paid for by private capital than they can out of something they build themselves? That’s fine as long as the parts developed and paid for with taxes are open sourced. > Are we saying government's should just be locked into single-build custom software for all eternity? Not sure I follow. There’s no reason why software cannot be developed and supported by multiple for-profit entities. As long as the output is open source. > A single piece of software can be used by multiple different governments... In which case no one government has "paid for it". As a taxpayer, that’s not my problem. It is the problem of company behind the software. > In that scenario, how is a government any different to any other B2B customer? It’s different because the money the government operates on comes from taxes. The government should put the money back in the local economy and finance the development of the open source software. I understand that this is a very loaded statement.
2Gkashmiri 4y ago
>A single piece of software can be used by multiple different governments... In which case no one government has "paid for it". That is the point of free software. NASA writes a software so why should any other person/government need to redo the same effort twice? They got their moneys worth for their work so if someone enjoys that later for free, why is that a problem? Suppose a small municipality needs a small backscratch software, they hire a local Dev, that Dev gets the job done and the municipality releases it as free software. Now why shouldn't any other govt anywhere in the world not leverage that? Why can't you pay Microsoft to develop a new feature in Linux kernel for example? Why do you assume a for profit entity has to keep their work proprietary? Do you know how freelancing or project based jobs work? A tender is made and L1 is chosen. The output should be open sourced so what's the problem?

rad_gruchalski 4y ago

> What if the government can get better capability out of a SaaS product paid for by private capital than they can out of something they build themselves? That’s fine as long as the parts developed and paid for with taxes are open sourced. > Are we saying government's should just be locked into single-build custom software for all eternity? Not sure I follow. There’s no reason why software cannot be developed and supported by multiple for-profit entities. As long as the output is open source. > A single piece of software can be used by multiple different governments... In which case no one government has "paid for it". As a taxpayer, that’s not my problem. It is the problem of company behind the software. > In that scenario, how is a government any different to any other B2B customer? It’s different because the money the government operates on comes from taxes. The government should put the money back in the local economy and finance the development of the open source software. I understand that this is a very loaded statement.

2Gkashmiri 4y ago

>A single piece of software can be used by multiple different governments... In which case no one government has "paid for it". That is the point of free software. NASA writes a software so why should any other person/government need to redo the same effort twice? They got their moneys worth for their work so if someone enjoys that later for free, why is that a problem? Suppose a small municipality needs a small backscratch software, they hire a local Dev, that Dev gets the job done and the municipality releases it as free software. Now why shouldn't any other govt anywhere in the world not leverage that? Why can't you pay Microsoft to develop a new feature in Linux kernel for example? Why do you assume a for profit entity has to keep their work proprietary? Do you know how freelancing or project based jobs work? A tender is made and L1 is chosen. The output should be open sourced so what's the problem?