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Comment by brian_cloutier | Hacker News Reader

This title is link bait.

The CIA wants to pay for software on demand instead of using long fixed licenses. This way they won't be quite as locked into a given product and will have a much easier time catching up with the state of the art.

An interesting note is it sounds like the CIA wants to host software internally (understandable) and pay for what they use by telling you how much they used.

There is no revolution here, unless you're in the business of providing software to the CIA. And even then, only your pay structure is changing.

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Totally agree on the title, and revolution is a strong term outside of the immediate sphere of affected vendors.. but consider that sphere, and how many businesses operate with giant enterprise licensing agreements.

I think it might be a bigger deal than you think. It's not just pay structure, it's the fact that the sales cycle, and jobs that would be at stake if someone admitted purchasing multi-million dollar bullshit encourages companies to hire great sales teams, sell crap product, and refuse to innovate.

I'd love to see this take hold and infect other agencies that rely on my tax dollars for ridiculous DOORS licenses, etc.

The other thing I want to add, is most companies make their money from this type of long drawn out licensing cycle. They lose money on the build, but the long period of which they "maintain" is what make the most money.

Its even at the point where Govt contractors don't understand how to charge for what the CIA proposes. Its good for the tax payer, bad for the big govt contractors and hopefully will save the govt large amounts of money.

I am happy to see it as a tax payer even though I work for one of the large govt contractors. I wouldn't consider it link bait. It is a revolution in the idea that contractors won't know how to deal with this.

Totally! And the funny thing is that it's something of a cultural food chain. The next-biggest entities that likely suffer from this are the sorts of companies (the Boeings, HPs, Lockheads, Oracles...) that are selling these agencies the goods (because they buy lots of their software this way as well). I'd be thrilled to see it trickle down and change the way a lot of these projects are bought-and-paid-for.

That said? It's nerve-wracking. My (barely educated) impression is that lot of these projects are something like selling a multi-million dollar project that hasn't been built yet to the organizational equivalent of the cat-lady from the Simpsons. Attaching what are essentially performance-weighted payment structures to it (we'll pay you when/if we use it) sounds risky. Even if you think you're capable of building a solid product, you're success at this point also depends largely on the client's ability to predict and specify their actual needs.

I'm in the weeds, but my point is that I wonder if the CIA might find bidders for these projects turn shy.

Excellent summary, thanks for posting.

An interesting note is it sounds like the CIA wants to host software internally (understandable) and pay for what they use by telling you how much they used.

Isn't that how most larger IT departments already work?

I remember at one job in the past, we would take a regular survey of Microsoft license usage on the network for reporting to said Microsoft.

It is from Reuter...so a title as link bait wouldn't surprise me.

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