Let's say you own a company. You hire a group of programmers to come in and fix or develop some code. You pay them a lot of money for this work. When they are done they use the code YOU PAID FOR to form a company, attract investors and go into business.
That is theft.
Is this company using code and tools developed with taxpayer money to now profit? Are investors going to profit from something that we paid for and should rightfully be in the public domain.
What I said makes complete sense provided the scenario I painted is correct.
What would it look like to not be considered theft? Something like this: The government needs help fixing the Obamacare website. A group of investors gets together to fund the required work. They compete for the contract with others. One wins the contract. They offer their services at a reasonable cost. The government stipulates that all software developed under this contract will be open source and in the public domain. The company completes the work. Now it can apply for a contract to maintain and enhance the codebase. And so can anyone else. We, the taxpayers, paid for the code and own it. We did not pay to fund a for profit company that would then hild us hostage, have a monopoly based on what should be a public open source code base and create millions of dollars of profit for investors who did not fund the development of that code and took none of the risk.
For all I know these folks are on the level. If that's the case I apologize with all sincerity. Still, I would like to see a statement clarifying whether or not a substantial portion of their now-commercial code base was paid for with taxpayer dollars under "war emergency" conditions and if they are effectively stealing what should be owned by the people of the US in order to form the foundation of a company that is probably going to rake in hundreds of millions of dollars per year with a virtual monopoly. I'd like to see that question answered.
It's not theft. In fact, many companies are started this way. As long as they negotiate a contract that retains or licenses code use, they're good.
Businesses do this to each other all the time. Why should Government be special? I don't believe the software would have been written in the first place if your idealistic regulations were in existence, and the people who'd be at a loss would be.... the taxpayers! If the service that way paid for was delivered and the contract made the proper stipulations, this is all fine and dandy.
Also, "we the taxpayers own it" if it's open-source is also not true. If the BSD license was put to use, for example, then any company could go off and make money using the source code.
That is theft.
Is this company using code and tools developed with taxpayer money to now profit? Are investors going to profit from something that we paid for and should rightfully be in the public domain.
What I said makes complete sense provided the scenario I painted is correct.
What would it look like to not be considered theft? Something like this: The government needs help fixing the Obamacare website. A group of investors gets together to fund the required work. They compete for the contract with others. One wins the contract. They offer their services at a reasonable cost. The government stipulates that all software developed under this contract will be open source and in the public domain. The company completes the work. Now it can apply for a contract to maintain and enhance the codebase. And so can anyone else. We, the taxpayers, paid for the code and own it. We did not pay to fund a for profit company that would then hild us hostage, have a monopoly based on what should be a public open source code base and create millions of dollars of profit for investors who did not fund the development of that code and took none of the risk.
For all I know these folks are on the level. If that's the case I apologize with all sincerity. Still, I would like to see a statement clarifying whether or not a substantial portion of their now-commercial code base was paid for with taxpayer dollars under "war emergency" conditions and if they are effectively stealing what should be owned by the people of the US in order to form the foundation of a company that is probably going to rake in hundreds of millions of dollars per year with a virtual monopoly. I'd like to see that question answered.