On Tue, Sep 24, 2002 at 01:26:10PM -0700, Andrew Plato wrote: > Honestly Seth, I really don't think giving the state the source > code would do much good? I can't argue for the state as a whole; I can argue based on my own experiences in IT, for a small-medium healthcare company, that we would have been far more efficient if we had the source code for our billing database. > Most organizations (particularly governments) barely have the > resources to keep their systems turned on, let alone > re-engineering their software. Even if these places got the source > code, they wouldn't know what to do with it. Sometimes. Sometimes not. Where I expect the usefulness would come in handy is contracting third parties to do the modifications. That would loosen the "you bought company X once, ten years ago, now you're stuck with their support" problem. > Second, no commercial firm in the WORLD is going to just hand over > their intellectual assets to and organization so they can go about > using it and expanding upon it and cutting out the maker. If this > were the case, I GUARANTEE you would see prices of commercial > software skyrocket to utterly unobtainable prices. These costs > would be necessary to compensate for the numerous people who would > simply steal the source code and go off and make their own products > and sell them. This is what copyright law is for. (Yes, it does have uses! :) Consider: If the state required open sources for their software, then vendors would have no choice: either supply the source, or lose out on potentially large (and lucrative :) government contracts. _Someone_ would fill this void. > Furthermore, we already HAVE third parties supporting commercial products. > My firm sells about 50 different technologies from IDSs, firewalls, servers, > sniffers, etc. We support all those products (in addition to the support > the manufacturer provides.) And we don't have to own the source code. > Anitian signs a reseller agreement as part of that agreement we > are licensed to help firms implement and use those technologies. Sometimes > that means working directly with the engineering staff at our suppliers > And helping them improve the product based on our customer's input. Having an inside line on the engineering department of a company would help; however, the problem this is suppose to solve is not being held to one, and only one, company for solutions. > And your friend, who works at Large Company, answered this question > perfectly - he already modifies everything, including MS products. > So why do we need to hand over source code to these people when only > a handful of people may benefit from it? Why would a firm hand over > its IP when it would immediately deflate the value of their products? Because business can be massively improved for those people who _can_ get benefit out of modifying their software; I maintain that the state is probably one of those customers. -- http://www.wirex.com/
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