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Comment by Osiris | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure a lot of people, myself included, feel that government projects would be better and cheaper if they were developed as open source rather the the typical proprietary solutions developed by contractors that we see today.

What's your take on government and open source projects like this one?

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Completely agree. We built openFDA from the beginning with the mindset that everything we produce will be open source. Our hope is that users of openFDA can help us make the API more efficient, return better data (we do a lot of cleanup), and independently verify our methodology.

Beyond improving our own site, it would be absolutely fantastic if someone took openFDA and spun up their own copy. That could be another government agency using it to serve up different data, an external group mirroring openFDA in case of government shutdown or other issue, or a company that uses our code to build something innovative.

I know that sentiment is shared among a lot of agencies right now. In particular, 18F (https://18f.gsa.gov) is a new digital services delivery unit that is looking to do this at a huge scale across the federal government.

The current state of federal IT contracting is so horrendous, that it is worth trying something if it has a 50% chance of failure, but how much harder is it to get contractors to work on a project if your contract mandates that it be open source or Free Software?

seanherron, do you work for a contractor or are you an in-house developer for the FDA or another federal agency?

I'm a federal employee serving as a Presidential Innovation Fellow (http://whitehouse.gov/innovationfellows) working on open data initiatives at the FDA. We worked with a contractor to build the platform and were happy to find they were incredibly excited about the prospect of open source.

Well if the site turned out well and you liked the experience of working with them, give the contractor some love! Who are they?

We're Iodine (http://www.iodine.com), a consumer health startup based in SF. Our backgrounds are varied but many of us came from Google, including three of us from the search team. We're big believers in both open source and open data and we're excited to be part of openFDA!

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