Questions asked during interviews with government vendor staff regarding procurement of FOSS:

1. Are you aware of, or does your company have a standard boilerplate contract for use with governments that addresses most of the common legal procurement issues that arise in your contracting with governments.

2. What are the parts/clauses of the boilerplate that you most often have to reference/modify/deal with?

• Choice of law / venue issues
• Indemnity of IP infringement (Trademark issues, copyright issues, patent issues)
• Tort - Personal Injury, Data Privacy

1. Are you aware of cost thresholds within certain cities beyond which procurement requirements are triggered. How much is this threshold usually?

2. How often do you have to reference, or be sure to comply with government procurement regulations in place in the jurisdictions you sell to?

3. Have you ever had mistaken “mismatch” issues between an RFP and a response you submitted. What were the points in the RFP that were “mismatched”? (e.g. technical feature, open source or other kind of “code state” requirement, data standards or other dependency requirement)

4. Has delivery/work for a government client ever been significantly held up due to a procurement policy/procedural issue on the client side? Did you learn of, and if so, what the specific issue was, and what was it?

5. What are some of the best practices in place in your company for proactively dealing with legal issues governments worry about the most with the procurement of FOSS? (e.g. code review to verify that no patents are being infringed)

6. Are there any legal issues you’ve encountered or heard of others encountering regarding government procurement of FOSS that your company has found to be difficult to overcome, or for which there does not seem to be any clear guidance on how to overcome.