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Comment by clejack | Hacker News Reader

I was recently wondering why something of this nature hasn't happened long ago. Governments have to be spending so much money on licensing fees.

It seems like you could throw a fraction of that money at open source software, actually make it good and then not be beholden to corporations like Microsoft or Google. Combine this sort push between multiple governments and the world gets good (at least relatively) software for all of the major office and design concerns.

CAD software is the same. I tried freecad recently after a long hiatus and came back to immediately crashing after trying to make a cube from a sketch and also finding out that there's no midpoint constraint (wtf) if I remember correctly.

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>> It seems like you could throw a fraction of that money at open source software, actually make it good

As much as I love OSS I don't think throwing money at it is what's going to make it rival large closed-source software projects. You need clear direction and goals which won't happen when building by committee.

That's a fair point, but I think it primarily depends on the nature of the committee. I could be wrong because I don't operate in oss spaces, so I'm not sure about their structure.

The first acknowledgement is that ui and design is just as important as technical functionality because a good idea that no one can use is a bad idea.

If we can have a technical team collaborate to design oss code, why can't we have a design team as well that's focused purely on themes, UX, and design philosophy?

Of course this is all prefaced on the idea that the money is there to support such a team. I suspect good designers are less likely to be on the "working for free" bandwagon.

Financial support can bring in better talent, then the oss teams need to structure them selves properly so intransigence doesn't set in.

If you're a government, it makes more sense to throw the money at creating your own infrastructure than paying to make a foreign company control everything you're running.

Everything is alright until the country with the highest obesity rate in the world chooses not to honor your patent for ozempic for example and makes it for a lot cheaper back home, then you escalate, then they escalate, something something your software stops getting updates or gets locked down.

I obviously don't think this is a likely scenario to happen, but so is getting nuked, yet every government has some sort of bunker command center, but everyone just seems ok with trusting those US companies with everything.

And today you don't even have to recreate the wheel, there are some open source alternatives for almost everything, and as a government if you put in the money you could improve on those, other governments can get inspired and improve on them as well, etc.

If the US sanctions you, it'll be much much harder for American companies like microsoft to send updates legally...

So it's on the escalation ladder for sure.

The midpoint constraint you seek in the symmetry constraint that looks like this: ><

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