Hi, On Wed, Apr 8, 2009 at 5:42 PM, John Bywater < [email protected]> wrote:
> Of course public developments should be underwritten by a public license > (and we should continue to demand they are) but it's probably neither > sufficient nor absolutely strictly necessary. At the same time, there are > other equally important tendencies which we would all benefit from having in > general circulation. Open source doesn't have all the answers, but at least > open source is listening.... I don't have all the answers either, but I've > got a large sheet of paper. :-) > They used to do (maybe still do for all I know) a very interesting thing in the States back in the 80's, before the FSF and free/open source software was widely known about. Software written for NASA (and presumably other federal entities too) was federally owned. When NASA sold that software on, the company who bought that software gained full copyright to the software. This freed the software up to have a longer and more useful life than it otherwise would have had. A practical example of this is the NQS software that was developed for NASA in the mid-80's, but which has been popular worldwide thanks to being put under the GNU GPL after being bought by Monsanto. Because it was made available as free software, volunteers were able to fix its many serious bugs, and continue to make it work on newer operating systems (such as Linux) which simply didn't exist back in the mid-80's. I guess my point is that there is a strong case for public money being used to create public software. It's our money after all ... why shouldn't it be our software too? Best regards, Stu -- Stuart Herbert e: [email protected] t: +44 7966 284577 w: http://www.stuartherbert.com/ b: http://blog.stuartherbert.com/
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