[Am-info] Government purchases of service contracts would be a great way to fund free software development

[Hans Reiser]

Jamie, if you really want to make an impact on funding for open source, 
you could talk these government procurement folks into purchasing 
government wide support contracts from the authors of extensively used 
pieces of free software. For instance, if Namesys landed such a contract 
for ReiserFS, it would likely make a huge difference in our ability to 
fund ReiserFS code development. Probably this is true of everyone else 
writing free software.

The percentage of government users of ReiserFS who buy service from us 
is about zero, which is far less than the percentage who buy service 
contracts from persons who sell proprietary file systems, and this is a 
highly unfortunate phenomenom that is true for everyone in our free 
software business. There is no economic rationale for this failure to 
buy service if the product is free, it just is, and should not be.

Hans

Roy Bixler wrote:

>On Newsforge, there's a nice addendum to the story of the German
>government's adoption of Linux as a supported platform.
>
>Nader and Love: U.S. government could end Microsoft monopoly by
>changing purchasing policy
>http://newsforge.com/newsforge/02/06/04/1625209.shtml?tid=4
>
> Tuesday June 04, 2002 - [ 05:12 PM GMT ]
> Topic - Government -  - By Grant Gross - 
>If the U.S. government really wants to end the Microsoft monopoly,
>it has an easy way to do so without involving a bunch of antitrust
>lawyers, suggest consumer activist and former presidential candidate
>Ralph Nader and technology consumer activist Jamie Love. The two are
>asking the government to change its software procurement policy to
>require that office suites work on multiple operating systems, or to
>require office software to disclose its file formats.
>
>  
>