Sloppy's Journal: Custom Software, ProgPower

When the company I work for writes custom software, we usually retain the copyright on it. Why? Because the customer is too dumb to ask for ownership of it. It's pretty neat, because it lets us get paid to write it, and then we have a product we can sell to our customer's competitors (or other people in a similar market). And then they pay to improve it some more. And then we sell it some more.

Product development, where customers pay for the development and the product. Yum. It's been good for us, that's for sure. No flames, please.

But "the customer is too dumb" is really the only excuse we have. There have also been a few occasions when the customer wasn't too dumb. Ok, fine. Getting paid only once to do the work, is still profitable. Sure, we'd like dumber customers, but we can work with smart ones too.

One of those smarter ones was the State of New Mexico. Actually, we didn't get the contract on that job, but part of the proposal was that the state would then own the software we were going to write.

Fair enough. We still wanted the job.

Turns out NM isn't the only state government that wants to own the stuff that it pays for. It's actually pretty common. What may not be common (I haven't checked), is that some states are considering laws to prevent themselves from being dumb. That's where a tale in Oklahoma comes in.

In March 2004, Oklahoma House of Reps easily passed a bill requiring that the state try to gain ownership of any custom software that it hired someone else to write. Make sense?

But the bill didn't get through the Oklahoma State Senate, because a company that doesn't even produce custom software, lobbied to stop it.

Why would this company do such a thing? Why indeed. Read what happened. I hope you're happy, Oklahoma taxpayers. I hope you're happy, everybody.

I'm outta here. Tomorrow, I fly to Atlanta for ProgPower 5 (and the Pre-Show Party) and I don't come back home until Talk Like A Pirate Day. Like my CMF vacation, I got a hotel room within "staggering distance" which means this is gonna be a hell of a drunken debauch. Some bad news about PP5, though: due to a freak lawnmowing accident (?!) Zak Stevens is out. So while Atlanta is expected to be pretty rainy from the Ivan remnants, there will be no "Handful of Rain."

Prog Power

[Tet]

It looks like a pretty good lineup this year. Whatever you do, don't miss Edguy. They're an awesome live band, and "Hellfire club" is their best CD to date by quite some margin IMHO. I saw Brainstorm supporting Nightwish a few months ago and they were pretty good. Kamelot far surpassed my expectations when I saw them live, too, so all in all, a pretty decent bill. Hope you enjoy it.

Me? Well this year's Bloodstock [uk.com] was a couple of weeks ago, and the highlight for me were Primal Fear, who completely stole th