Re: Software as a public service

Joe Corneli wrote:
> Let me just say that if (we were in the weird scenario in which) the
> government had some vested interest in keeping its documents out of
> the public domain, what you say suggests that all they have to do is
> hire contractors to do everything.  FOI would still make documents
> available for fair-use review, but there would be none of the "free"
> stuff associated with with PD documents.
> 
> Is this possibility a likelihood at all?

With respect to the US government specifically, it is becoming very 
common for most of the functions of many Federal agencies to be 
performed by contractors, with US government personnel simply exercising 
  oversight over the contracts. In the area of IT specifically, this is 
not necessarily done specifically to keep documents and software out of 
the public domain, it's more of a long-term trend driven by many 
factors: salary disparities between the US government and commercial 
industry that make it difficult to hire competent government technical 
staff, ideological pressure to reduce the size of government (at least 
in terms of number of employees) in favor of giving business to 
commercial companies, and so on.

For more information on the general trend of US government outsourcing 
efforts, google for "Circular A-76", the Office of Management and Budget 
directive on outsourcing. For real-life examples of how this works (or 
not, as the case may be), search the web sites for Federal Computer Week 
(fcw.com) or Government Computer News (gcn.com) for "A-76".

> I don't know what the
> government (or we the people) might stand to gain by keeping things
> out of the PD.  But anyone with 2 red pennies to rub together knows
> that competitive bidding and the free market are an attractive way of
> doing business.  So it might turn out that the government has a vested
> interest - not in keeping documents out of the PD per se - but in
> working with private contractors to do increasingly high level gov't
> functions.  E.g. maybe instead of NASA, in the future, we'll just have
> the space division of Virgin.

Note that NASA has already in effect totally outsourced shuttle 
operations to United Space Alliance, a Boeing/Lockheed Martin joint 
venture. Unfortunately that's not the same as simply leaving space 
transportation to Virgin Galactic, etc. What we have with the US space 
program (and with many US government IT outsourcing initiatives, to 
bring this back to FSB topics), is simply a government program with 
government supplying the policies and requirements and commercial 
contractors implementing the specified polices and requirements, 
typically on a cost-plus basis.

A closer analogy to Virgin Galactic would be the US government practice 
over the past couple of decades in moving away from government-written 
or government-commissioned software to procurement of "commercial off 
the shelf" (COTS) software from commercial software vendors like 
Microsoft, Oracle, etc. In the past US government agencies were quite 
willing to have, say, a relational DBMS written just for them, and 
contractors were quite willing to take the government's money -- often 
amounting to millions or tens of millions of dollars -- and write one. 
(This is a real-life example, by the way.)

In this sense open source/free software is actually viewed by some as a 
step backward as far as the US government is concerned: Why should the 
government want to modify the software it procures, or have a contractor 
do it? Isn't that what caused the whole problem in the first place? 
(These are not my opinions, I hasten to add.)

> Then free market forces might decide whether the related sources were
> public domain, GPL, or proprietary, or whatever else.  (The vested
> interests of the government and/or the public in this matter might
> come into play here too, again, if there are any.)

Given that Apache, GNU/Linux, MySQL, etc., are also COTS products, then 
you are correct that the US government now has more choices in the 
market than it did before, and government agencies may well end up 
choosing FOSS products for many of the same reasons that corporations do.

> It seems like sort of a historical fluke that gov't works would be
> PD-as-in-freedom and not just public-as-in-FOI.  But I haven't had a
> chance to look at the links from Frank Hecker about this yet... maybe
> they explain that.

With regard to US government attitudes towards making software freely 
available (i.e., public domain or FOSS), another factor to look at is 
the long history of so-called "technology transfer" activities in 
agencies such as NASA, Department of Energy, etc. For an example of this see

   http://technology.jsc.nasa.gov/

This whole effort was pretty much driven by the idea that the public was 
best served *not* by making government-developed or -commissioned 
research, software, etc., freely available to everyone, but rather by 
licensing patents and copyrights on an exclusive basis to commercial 
companies. In other words, it's basically the "strong IP rights promote 
innovation and economic growth" argument applied to government activities.

By now "technology transfer" in this sense has been institutionalized in 
many government agencies, with a dedicated bureaucracy measured by how 
many licensing agreements they negotiate. I think getting back to the 
former ideal of "what is paid for by all, should be free for all" is 
going to be a slow hard slog.

Frank

-- 
Frank Hecker
[email protected]