Your Tax Dollars Buying Open Source Software 182
Roblimo has a story over at NewsForge about DevIS, a software company that relies on Free and open source software to not just weather but actually do well in the current software economy. Part of the reason may be that the company doesn't preach software philosophy; they just find that combining well-tested (and mostly GPL'd) software tools is the path of least resistance when it comes to building Internet applications. Most of their work is for the Federal government; always nice to see public dollars supporting public software. Can anyone point out other good examples of similar businesses?
I'd rather see... (Score:2, Interesting)
whitehouse.gov and cl-httpd (Score:4, Interesting)
http://www.pub.whitehouse.gov used to run cl-httpd, an open source web server written in Common Lisp. I just checked the link and it's dead now, but according to NetCraft, www.whitehouse.gov is running an unknown web server on Linux.
Tax Deductible Donations == Subsidy (Score:5, Interesting)
Just to restate the obvious, but if you donate some of your own money to a qualified 501(c)3 organization such as the Free Software Foundation, then, at least in the USA, you may deduct it on your tax return from your gross income.
So in that sense, the government is subsidizing open source software at whatever your marginal tax rate happens to be.
They're subsidizing a lot of other organizations that way, too, such as mortgage creditors, but I feel that the public investment in more and improved free software contributes more to the overall productivity of the economy [I'm sure realtors and home builders would dispute me].
DARPA funded OS robot software: Player/Stage (Score:3, Interesting)
P/S is used by research labs all over the world, as well as by several DARPA funded projects in the US. The program manager (an official agent of the Man) has always been extremely cool about the OS nature of the project. He immediately understood that by staying OS we could pool the resources of hundreds of researchers, most of whom were not being paid by DARPA, to solve a pressing need for network-friendly robot interfaces and re-usable code. A good deal for everyone.
Simple (Score:5, Interesting)
I could go on and on about the benefits of open source, but we have all heard that arguement before, so here is just a real brief recap:
1. OSS is cheaper then proprietary, or free
2. Because it is open source, you can always have in-house people maintain it or hire someone else too. This longevity of the same product will save the tax payers even more money by avoiding upgrade cycles.
3. Because it is open source, you can integrate it into future projects easily.
4. Because of 2 and 3 above, you as a government entity are not chained to a single closed-sourced vendor with no control over products purchased with the public reserves.
The Goverment invented OSS -- sort of...... (Score:5, Interesting)
By law any software produced by tax dollars is available to a citizen for the cost of distribution. Classified stuff is obviously not available.
But if you want a copy of that Cobol program that calculated your income tax on a nice new 6250BPI tape just ask.
All of this predates GNU, copyleft and OSS by many years. So the government (Al Gore anyone?) can take credit for Open Source.
Get Fscking Real... (Score:3, Interesting)
Most defense contracting is a rubber stamp process. Contractors get the MANDATORY yearly price increases, freely given by the gov't, then you have companies tack on extra in fees with little or no real accountability.
If Lockheed builds your F-16, you get the parts from them. If, for some reason, the price on an F-16 widget goes up 200% in one year, this is rarely challenged. The process to do so costs almost as much.
As a Navy boss once said, "Yeah, they got us on this one, but we'll get them on the BIG ones..." This was for a part that was elevated over 1000% in less than three years time. Total cost was over 10 million dollars. Big ones... Right.
Does "barely getting by" = "success"? (Score:2, Interesting)
With 30+ employees (I'll assume 32.5 employees) and $4 million in revenue, that's $123,000 per employee.
Business owners know that your typical employee costs around 150% of their yearly salary. With that in mind, only $82,000 of your original $123,000 per employee is left.
But, wait! You haven't paid for their computers yet. Or the office space. Or the guy that empties the trash cans. Or electricity. Or the Internet connection (hey, browsing pr0n takes bandwidth, and bandwidth costs money!). And a million and one other things that we don't ever think about. Running a business COSTS MONEY.
I'll pull a number out of my and shave off another 25%. That leaves $61,500 per employee.
There's more! You damn well know the managers and executives are paying themselves a lot more than the slaves ^H^H^H^H^H^H developers.
At the end of the day, the developers are probably getting a well "below average" paycheck, and the company is probably barely getting by.
This is success? By some measures, YES.
BUT...forgive me if I'm NOT impressed. They probably won't be able to keep every employee busy 100% of the time (and you still have to pay idle employees -- at least, I assume they're salaried rather than hourly). If rough times hit this company, I'm willing to bet they don't have enough money in the bank to get by for long.
-Teckla
Private Business Too! (Score:3, Interesting)
What's been great lately, private companies are making use of open-source Win32 libraries, and are actively contributing to the pool of Win32 open source applications.
For examples, look at Indy [indyproject.org] and Turbopower [turbopower.com]. There's hundreds more...The main reason, in my mind at least, is that the MPL (Mozilla Public License) has opened up new ways of ensuring intellectual property remains secure, while allowing companies to make use of and develop open software as well.
BNT and WDI (Score:1, Interesting)
Ant, Axis, Tomcat, Xerces, Xalan, Log4J, probably others.. from the Apache project are core components.
The system uses MySQL for its own persistence purposes (it can run on almost any SQL db, but we prefer MySQL)
Also, some experimental/newer components use Castor for XML marshalling/unmarshalling,
the JCSP package (Java Communicating Sequential Processes), JUnit for test first development.
When time permits or the need arises, I try to make useful contributions to the open source projects whos code we use. (finding bugs, making patches, etc..), which I think is the best way for developers to help open source software projects.
Butane.
Re:I'd rather see... (Score:4, Interesting)
exactly why doesn't the work these guys do to produce solutions count as production? and how is a complete solution to a specified problem(need) without value? Open source is a large collection of unrealated works. Production in this context is turning the raw material (OSS) into marketable products. Think about the difference between iron ore and punch presses and cars. I think you would call a building a car production no? How is taking the raw material of OSS and making it into a solution different if someone needs it?
If you are making the point that only things like real estate and gold have real value ok. But in the everyday world of common idioms. People pay for the things they need. And value is a measure of satifaction with the solution.
my $.02
Re:I'd rather see... (going WAY off topic here) (Score:3, Interesting)
From an economic standpoint, waste often is good. For instance, in retail products, more packaging means a more expensive product, and therefore increased revenue that produced it. Time wasted on contracts is often paid for by the principal -- translating into profit for the contractor. You see, waste increases the flow of capital in nearly every case. Of course, that doesn't make it right, just economically desirable. The social and environmental costs are tremendous, though, and far outweigh the economic benifit - IMHO.
And now to move back on topic. What you seem to be missing here is that many companies include open source software in their solutions. They don't charge for the inclusion of that software, just for the custom stuff they developed to work with the OSS stuff. Their customers are paying for custom solutions that build on this software, not for the (open source) software itself.
Here at the company I work for, we are developing web software that uses Linux, qMail, Apache, MySQL, Perl, and ColdFusion. We don't charge for any of those licenses except for the ColdFusion. We'd have to charge more if we went with Netscape iPlanet and Oracle.
So, we save money for our customers by saving on the cost of those liscenses. As for the ColdFusion, well, all of our developers are proficient in it and few are comfortable with the OSS app languages such as PHP and Perl (my personal preferences). Perhaps one day...
Re:The Federal branch of the United States (LLC) (Score:3, Interesting)
Hehe! Funny stuff.
No, your rights can be revoked after "due process of law". See the Fifth Amendment.
They can take your property away too (after giving you "just compensation" of course).
So you should say, "What were we before the 5th Amendment?"
Re:How are public dollars supporting it? (Score:1, Interesting)
1. Don't confuse "open source' with GPL. Derivative
works from GPL must stay GPL, which is not always
true for the other favors of open source licenses.
2. As a professional Linux developer, I know
very well that the most companies using Free Software
are, for the most part, users that don't give back to the
community. They are leeches! And of course there
can be some vage indirect benefits to the Free Software, but
lets not spin this out of control: the benefits are in very general
indirect. This is not what in English we mean be "contributing".
Re:Similar businesses... (Score:3, Interesting)
That kind of overspending, overspecing, and all the layers of boilerplate documentation and red tape are the Bread And Butter for the fat-assed companies that provide it.
Sorry. The $600 toilet seats may just be anectotal, but they're evidence of a big hustle scene that Stinks.
Re:How are public dollars supporting it? (Score:2, Interesting)