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0 pointslogisticseh3y ago0 comments

It's the other way around -- academic R&D is just about the only type of government spending for which there's wide-spread support for openness and a lack of entrenched power against openness.

The USG spent $6B on cloud computing in 2020. That number is increasing quickly. To say nothing of the massive quantities of non-OSS software that the government buys and incorporates into is own business-critical processes. And it's not just government licenses, but also anyone who interacts with the government. E.g., try interacting with any government agency without an Office 365 license.

You get really funny looks if you say that MSFT should have to give away Office 365 for free if the government is going to use it for anything.

But total USG spend on closed-source software has to be well into the 30B-50B range conservatively. For reference, the entire NSF budget is $10B.

The main reason for this is that there are many monied and powerful stakeholders who benefit from selling closed software to USG, whereas the academic publishers a tiny, often not even American-owned, and got super greedy and screwed their natural contingency (academics hate them as much as or more than anyone else).

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adgjlsfhk13y ago

There's a difference between the government paying to use software and paying for it to be developed.

rcthompson3y ago

I'm not sure the difference is as cut and dry as you're making it out to be. A big organization doesn't just pay Microsoft a zillion dollars for a million Office licenses and then never talk to them again. There's an ongoing support relationship, which for large enough customers might include things like developing features on request.

logisticsehOP3y ago

Most of what the big contractors like Booz do is custom software. Every single cloud provider has an entire GovCloud division. Even Office has special Government licensing that behaves differently on the backend.

pksebben3y ago

I think part of the point here, is that the value from that investment should go to the investors, who are (if you buy the 'by the people, for the people' hype) the taxpayers.

Say I'm vulture capitalist Tom, and I pay a few gajillion dollars to developer Gupta to create a product for me. I would be understandably pissed if Gupta turned around and sold that same product to competitor vc Janet. She didn't pay for that dev work, I did.

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JamesBarney3y ago

The other difference is if you had to open source anything sold to the USG then no one would sell anything closed source to the USG.

And there's lots of useful software the government wants to buy that is closed source.

aaaaaaaaata3y ago

Useful to who, and for what?

joebob423y ago

The usg, for whatever that piece of software says on the tin. Unless you are just asking if there is any closed source software anywhere which provides value not totally replicable using oss, which seems like a silly question.

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