Who: Insights from a vendor with experience working on a government FOSS contracted project

Issue: Indemnity Amount

One of the pain points encountered during the procurement process was the dollar amount of indemnity to be provided by the vendor. The indemnity clause may pertain to many different types of liability, not just anticipated liabilities from use of FOSS. The city seemed to have a boilerplate requirement of 2M for indemnity. The vendor was not insured for this much, only 1M. The request by the city for the vendor to increase their indemnity amount was creating long delays for the completion of the contract because the vendor would have had to switch insurance carriers to acquire a 2M policy. Therefore, the city eventually reduced their request to 1M, to suit the insurance already available.

Issue: Lack of Standardization for Language in Contracts About Source Code Availability

As far as what parts of the code can be made open source (notwithstanding the expressed desire by the city to have the code be open source, and a statement that an an existing open source platform will be used), the contract is silent. Rather, the contract states that the city agency retains ownership of the code.

At some point, the content (used to customize the open source content management system) will be made publicly available via a commercial code hosting platform. Although the vendor has a certain understanding that the city intends to keep the content freely available (with certain other types of IP removed first such as copyrighted logos), the contract does not explicitly state this. Currently the content code is publicly available through a hosting platform kept by the vendor, but the plans are to move the code over to a commercial platform such as Google Code, once the content is complete.

The vendor is unclear as to what level of detail is really necessary to have in the contract regarding what parts of the code can be made freely available on an open source code repository hosting platform.

One of the reasons the vendor sees this is an issue is because there appears to be differences in contract language regarding parts of code to be open sourced between the projects he works on. The project with the city is nearly silent regarding what parts to open source, verses another contract with a private entity which has a lot of specific language regarding what code can be open sourced. Therefore, it is unclear to the vendor how much or how specific the language needs to be in a contract for ensuring that an application is entirely made open source and available.