The Washington Post reported that the U.S. Army recently was sued for copyright infringement by breaching a license agreement for software—which the U.S. Army apparently did. Okay, so that is government not at its best. The silver lining for the U.S. Army is that the copyright owner settled for $50 million--$130 million less than it would have cost the government to license the software. The silver lining for the copyright owner is an unexpected check for $50 million and, I would hope, a lot more business. The nice message for the rest of us is that the U.S. government can hire folks that can create software that works well. Here is a portion of the complaint:
In March 2009, Apptricity inadvertently learned that the Army may have been using more Apptricity software than that for which it had procured licenses. Apptricity employees attended a PD TIS Strategic Capabilities Planning Meeting held March 3-5, 2009 in Richmond, Virginia, where the U.S. Army Program Director stated that the Army was deploying thousands of devices with the Apptricity software.
