Re: Death by analogy Part 2 (was Re: is ada dead?)

["Michael P. Card" <michael.p.card@lmco.com>]

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Hey Al (& everyone else on CLA)-

Al Christians wrote:

>You are saying (?) that:
>
>1. Contractor can't figure out how to market this unless some one gives
>them a contract to figure that out, and

No, I am saying that there are some sticky intellectual property, national
security and ownership issues that make this kind of thing difficult. Not
impossible, just difficult. And the contractor is generally not paid to
market things they develop during the course of a contract, so there is the
"who pays" issue...

>2. Nobody can figure out how to give it away because lawyers turn colors
>over the prospect,  but

Again, almost. It can be figured out and probably can be done, but who is
going to pay the lawyers? The contractor is not going to want to spend
profit $ to pay lawyers to make the source code they developed open-source.
Why would they?

>3. There is some slim change that the government might be able to figure
>out how to give entrepreneur funding so that entrepreneur can use the
>government money to buy the product (from the government or from the
>contractor? IDK)

The government has unlimited rights already, and depending on the contract
they may have/ be able to purchase any remaining intellectual property
rights from the contractor. Why would the government do this? Specifically
for the purpose of commercializing defense technology much as they have
already commercialized some space technology. The government has spent
additional money to get technology it already paid for in defense/space
projects into the commercial business world before.

>and then be profitable business as a value-added
>reseller of this product to the refractory, yak-fat-extracting, widget
>womping, rental repair, and on-line fortune-telling industries? Sounds
>like a guaranteed ticket to the Fortune 65535.  Put my name on the list.

That's the idea. The general way this goes, I think, is that the
"commercializer" retains full intellectual property rights to any
enhancements they make to the government-owned stuff. I do not think the
government would get royalties in this kind of arrangement, so the
government is in the role of providing an industrial incentive (corporate
welfare if you like) for the purpose of putting new technology into the
economy, and doubtless they would expect their "investment" to be returned
manyfold by the benefits incurred. Similar arguments are made RE: side
benefits of the space program and the government-funded technology that
eventually made its way into consumer products. I am not prepared to argue
the merits of those arguments, but this is the general idea.

>BTW, one time previous when I was looking for available Ada database
>software, I came across a package on the Ada CD-ROM that was developed
>by a branch of the US government (I won't use any names
>because of what I'm going to say)  that wears tin hats and carries
>rifles.  This was some kind of keyed file package that returned data
>according to key using a linear search of the entire file for each
>request.  Whether this was first implemented to work with a tape drive,
>IDK.  Nothing about this is paranormal, but that it was written this
>way, and made available as a reusable component, and published on the
>Ada CD is a little bit different from what one would expect from reading
>too much CLA, where Ada renames Superb. But maybe the story for Ada is
>not that different from the story for everything else.

Wow! Sounds like the CD needed an editor (I mean the human variety)!!

- Mike


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