> Because I'm not talking about commodity software like firewalls (which > I've said about six times). I'm talking about large, custom-built > software like the Portland water utility system. The Netscreen example > is irrelevant. Okay. If we're only talking about custom-built software, then yeah, I agree with you whole-heartedly. From your initial comments, you made it sound like ALL software had to be open-source. That would be impossible for commercial products, but custom-built stuff - yeah, I would agree with you. I worked at a consulting firm in Seattle in the early 90s and we did a lot of custom software for the State of Washington. At the end of the contract, the state owned the programs, not us. And presumably they could then go hire anybody they wanted to support or tweak the software. Wow...are there really companies out there that try to retain licensing of the software they custom-design? That is lame. > That is also irrelevant. It is not about commodity vs. custom. Sure, use > commodity where ever you can. But tell me, where does one buy a > commodity driver's license management infrastructure? Thought so :) The > State needs to go custom when building large State infrastructure, and > my ONLY argument is that the State should mandate open source licensing > of the resulting system when they procure custom systems. Again, if we talking about custom-designed software, I would agree. I didn't really think this was done any other way. ------------------------------------ Andrew Plato, CISSP President / Principal Consultant Anitian Corporation (503) 644-5656 office (503) 201-0821 cell http://www.anitian.com <http://www.anitian.com> ------------------------------------
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Wed Sep 25 2002 - 02:56:32 PDT