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Comment by cdibona | Hacker News Reader

This is true(ish) but what happens in much of the USG is that they have contractors write the code and there is a big hole cut in the law to allow contractors to retain copyright and monetize code written for the government. The idea was that by allowing contractors to retain copyright, the costs would go down for government procurers and it allowed them to consider 'commercial off the shelf' (COTS) software.

In practice, the government can and has been locked into contractors for ongoing, unending and expensive maintenance.

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Any software or hardware built for the US or any State government should be required to be open sourced, with zero restrictions. Same with research.

It's ridiculous that we as tax payers don't have access to what we pay for.

I'm glad you've put so much effort into cutting through the red tape to get this out there. Thank you.

To be clear: I didn't release the nasa code, I went to a couple of meetings there, but they did all the work.

I just eval licenses all the time as part of my job, like some kind of weirdo.

I imagine the argument is probably that you're not paying for the source code you're paying for the solution.

This isn't as cut and dry as you might think. Should the US govt. pay full development cost for all software it contracts out? Contractors often take less NRE than makes sense if they can make a business case for said software elsewhere. If all contracts mean the work will be open source, then NREs will go up dramatically.

Contrast a private software development house with a company that only services government contracts. Why should the second have the benefit of having all the development expenses covered by the tax payer while retaining the same rights as a company that doesn't have those costs covered.

Seems to me that if you fund the development of the product from your own reserves, you have the right to sell to the government like it was any other customer. But if you do it as a work for hire, it's kind of bullshit to get to keep the rights and resell to other parties when possible -- who have already paid the development costs through their taxes.

It would also be a bit skeevy if the government was using tax payer money to develop products that compete with existing off the shelf products. Kind of bad manners to take someone's money and then use that to kill their business too.

How do costs go down by having to repurchase what would have already been available for free?

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