Are All Government Designed Software Projects Open Source?
from the raises-some-serious-questions dept
Brian Phipps digs deep into an article about open source efforts and pulls out an interesting point that's mostly buried in the story: "A Forbes article on open source reports that Mission Viejo firm Medsphere used the Freedom of Information Act to get the source code for federal hospital management software "developed at taxpayer expense." They are now using that software as part of their commercial open source product called OpenVista. Is this a new/valid/ethical way to get source code for a start-up? There must be tens of thousands of Federal applications out there that could have commercial potential. How does the US taxpayer benefit if these apps are exploited via FoIA and commercialized--since we paid for them in the first place. If they were all GPL'd that would be OK, but it's not clear that that's the case." This certainly does raise an awful lot of questions. Getting access to the source code is one thing -- assuming it's then open source is another. Anyone have more details on how this project went from FoIA request to open source software?
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Federally developed applications...
However, that does not mean that they can just be downloaded or are otherwise easily accessible, hence the FOIA request.
If you do get the source, however, the fact that they are Public Domain (and not copyrighted) means that you can do pretty much whatever you want with them.
Chris.
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Re: Federally developed applications...
Long story short is that yes people can wait around for the government to develop a technology and then commercialize it as they please. Of course a competing company has the same right to the source code as the first does... And really - when was the last time you saw a government agency do some real innovation in software that isn't sensitive? I am more suprised that they didn't use a commercial app in the first place.
As Chris said, making the request for the source is the hard part.
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Oh...
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Re: Oh...
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Re: Federally developed applications...
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Hackers Etc
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Re: Hackers Etc
Those people should learn that if the only thing standing in the way of life-critical security bugs being exploited by evil geeks is a reverse-compiler, then perhaps the most important thing is not whether the code is available. (To spell it out: Why, exactly, can our supposed Korean hacker access grannie's life support system?)
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Bad news for developers of voting software
Imagine a developer walking into a courthouse somewhere, paying $2 and saying "I want to see the source code for Diebold's AccuVote."
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Re: Bad news for developers of voting software
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No Subject Given
If a company took public domain software and then tried to apply the GPL to it, it might cause interesting problems. For starters, the person could get the public domain portion free themselves (unecumbered with GPL). The modifications certainly could be released under GPL.
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Re: Bad news for developers of voting software
Frankly, an open source voting machine makes sense, and shouldn't be that difficult to do.
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No Subject Given
See [West and Siobhán 2005 @ http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/westomahony.pdf]
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