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How open source developers can get more U.S. government contracts
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CommentsOne obvious approach is to start putting requests through Congress for legislative changes that will generate amendments to the FAR so they can better accommodate Open Source. This may take a long time. The other approach is less aesthetically pleasing, but more practical. All open source developers, contractors, distributors, administrators (etc) should give the appearance of only caring about their sales revenue and aim to sell Open Source Software products, each containing only a few binary packages, for as much money as the purchasing budgets can afford. The FAR was designed for that behavior pattern, and helps government buyers efficiently talk to vendors who exhibit it.
Debian GNU/Linux Government Edition (DGL-GE) would fit on a single CDROM and include all the source code for its binary packages. The retail price -- around $100 -- would include up to 2 hours of telephone or e-mail support (and/or software maintenance) for the registered user. The support could be used any time in the twelve months following the purchase date. DGL-GE would include the installer, the base packages and very little else. To manage the productivity of government employees, this should include X, icewm, solitaire, a media player, a web browser and network printing. Like other vendors' competing products, it should omit development tools and word processors.
Next to every commercial software product that is in the GSA schedule, there should be listings for each Open Source near-equivalent. It would be difficult for the GSA to reject our individual requests since these new listings would foster competition with a lower price, reasonable support options and (of course) different feature sets.
For example, Open Office (Debian Government Edition) could be a single CDROM with all the Debian packages needed to use just the office package itself. That new OO-DGL-GE product, priced around $200, would include one year of support, 4 hours maximum, with respect to a single specified user account.
Software in the Public Interest (Debian's legal entity) might offer a special bundle product SITE-DGL-GE (site license for Debian Government Edition) at perhaps $9990 for site administrators. It would include all Debian software in binary with unlimited access to Debian's bug tracking system and package archive as well as mandatory attendance at a one week training class. This class would teach its students how to use all elements of the Debian distribution, including the skills needed to be a package maintainer, so that a government administrator who took it would become eligible for developer rights on the distribution. SITE-DGL-GE would ship on seven CDs with a written statement that the source can be provided, if a written request is made within three years, by purchasing the new SHAREDSOURCE-DGL-GE product.
The SHAREDSOURCE-DGL-GE product would ship on about seven CDs and contain all the source packages for the distribution. Its price -- around $14,900 -- would only pay for the materials and the premium shipment (as required by the GPL). The product would be offered under the Debian Shared Source license agreement, indicating that the recipient may not make changes to the source files on the CDROM and can only inspect and critique the files on the CDROM. The shipping media would not be CD-RW, so it would be necessary to copy files from the CDROM to a hard drive before making any desired changes.
For the premium shipment, the seller would travel in person to the customer's site and spend a maximum of one week reviewing the source code (as directed by their QA specialists) with the customer's engineering team. This review is necessary to ensure that the engineers fully understand the limited rights they receive in conjunction with these CDROMs and know how to avoid violating the licenses on the source code files.
Lest you think I'm joking ... I'm not. If this approach is taken, the government would be able to purchase the software they need using the usual channels, and have developers with relevant expertise competing for who would accept the cheapest possible busman's holiday to the Washington DC area.
The rules in the FAR will look at this as healthy commercial retail competition.
The people doing the purchasing, unlike the rules, will see that their purchase is gaining one week of dedicated training for their software engineering team, training that is delivered by their chosen national expert on a specific software package.
No one would have to fix all the problems that might occur under one of these contracts on their own, since the money and work could be subcontracted.
The GSA schedule of approved purchasing sources is already long. There is plenty of room to add every open source developer who can comply with the generic rules and constraints for the GSA schedule list. Each sells a product with a slightly different combination of packages on a CDROM that represents whatever software he/she is willing to personally support. Imagine 200 people all selling OpenOffice, 50 people selling AbiWord, 100 people selling LaTeX bundles, plus others selling all the other open source word processing packages. Each of these individuals would be an equal competitor with companies that have proprietary, closed source near-equivalents.
I'm only using Debian as an example, not suggesting that we all start using Debian. Diversity is good.
Every distribution with a U.S. legal presence could offer equivalent products.
And, yes, so could individual developers.
Comments
on How open source developers can get more U.S. government contractsNote: Comments are owned by the poster. We are not responsible for their content.
- Three problems:
- Government employees are expert at manipulating the rules to make their life easy, which usually means making it hard for a new supplier to displace an incumbent
- Dealing with the government is a BIG hassle. There are a lot of forms to fill out, and actually getting paid is surprisingly difficult and time-consuming. Because of the time and effort, it is generally not worth dealing with the goverment at all unless it provides a major part of one's business
- The specific proposals in the article would probably fall foul of legal requirements that a product or service may not be sold to the government at a higher price than it's sold to anyone else (this is despite the higher costs of selling to the government).
having worked for the government and made many software (and hardware) purchases, I can tell you that it is different for each agency.
In 1996 we decided upon, evaluated, and bought an SGI compute farm, all within about 3 months. No hassle, and for what SGI got in payment, even under the GSA schedule...it was well worth their wait.
Not figuring out how to sell and/or work with the government because it's "too much hassle" is very short-sighted. It's the country's biggest customer, and it's quite easy to do business with, in my experience.
A CD only costs about 20c when made in Taiwan, so why bother to differentiate them?
Re:Same CDs, different description and price...
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on April 12, 2003 06:28 PMDebian's package manager dpkg/apt is slightly technically superior to RedHat/apt (http://apt.freshrpms.net). Debian package maintainers however do a much better job of chosing binary installation directories to maintain forward/backward compatibility. For example, Perl5.6 on on RedHat7.3 is installed to<nobr> <wbr></nobr>/usr/bin/perl/ while Perl5.8 on RedHat8 is installed in<nobr> <wbr></nobr>/usr/bin/perl/ so you cannot install both versions simaltaneously without messing around with source. On Debian, Perl5.6 is installed in<nobr> <wbr></nobr>/usr/bin/perl/5.6/ while Perl5.8 is installed in<nobr> <wbr></nobr>/usr/bin/perl/5.8/ so you can install both from binary packages easily.
And truth to tell, thats about all I liked about Debian. Other than its package management features, the rest of the system is obviously integrated by amateurs and volunteers rather than professionals. (Not to make fun of amateurs...) RedHat's systems have *far* more professional polish and integration. Debian's configuration tools are either non-existant or miserable; most of the time I end up manually editing text files to get what I wanted done. That was so 1997. Perhaps there are better tools somewhere else, but they weren't obvious, and I don't feel like searching for hours/days to learn to do something I did in a few minutes with RedHat. All of RedHat's tools and the installer are Free Software, so I have no idea why they haven't been ported to Debian.
That's not to say Debian is useless. In certain development environments (usually where Debian is already favored) it can be more useful than RedHat. But typically I will choose RedHat for its professional polish any day. On (increasingly rare) occasions package management with RedHat/apt can be annoying, but I do far more than just manage packages on my system.
Best Article I've ready on Newforge
Posted by: Ruben Safir on April 03, 2003 01:15 AM#