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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."

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Thanks for the link. That's a great reference point I did not know about.

OP does have a point that this software was subsidized by tax payers. One could argue the NSA needs advanced tools and that the costs of IDA Pro add up.

This, unfortunately, occurs so infrequently that it can safely be ignored by 99.9% of the economy. Businesses have really enjoyed having their cake and eating it too with the transition away from a highly involved acquisition process that generally resulted in a tailored solution that the USG owned, to the present COTS policy that allows them to then go on to sell software to people that have already effectively paid for it through taxes. While there was an impressive amount of bureaucracy and an infinitely self referential system of standards in the old method, it did lead to some pretty interesting side effects: Ada[0], IDEF[1], MIL-STD-498[2], etc.

The most recent liberation of useful taxpayer funded software that I can think of was over ten years ago, when NIST released NFIS2 - the fingerprint software that the FBI relied on. They of course had to be crappy about it and wrap it in export controls that limited its utility, but it was interesting to see all the work that internal development had done - very polished, with man pages going back to '97. Ah the memories: software classified as munitions, the clipper chip...

[0] http://archive.adaic.com/pol-hist/policy/naig94-1.txt

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDEF#The_IDEF_modeling_languag...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIL-STD-498

[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20041206072946/http://fingerprin...

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