…and the right to repair.
It’s a complicated issue. I wonder how much this issue is going to bleed over into space hardware?
8 thoughts on “Military Necessity”
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…and the right to repair.
It’s a complicated issue. I wonder how much this issue is going to bleed over into space hardware?
Comments are closed.
Seems like Case, Kubota, and the like could take a substantial peice of the market share by pledging not withhold such software.
Would suck to lose a war because one of the primes couldn’t fly a repair team out. Military procurement gets more insane every time I look at it. My take is that anything used by the military should not only be repairable in field, but also have a completely replaceable supply and production chain – you know, in case the original contractor can’t produce enough, goes bankrupt, or gets blown up.
It depends on what the problem is. For some things – modern fly-by-wire flight control laws come to mind – the only entity that has the know-how to fix it is the original company that did them; neither NAVAIR nor AFRL nor the Army equivalent has the personnel and the expertise. LO coatings are a similar scenario.
But many or even most mechanisms should be feasible to transfer the requisite knowledge to the customer.
The bigger issue is IP in general. If you’re a defense contractor, and the contract says that you have to supply the government all of your pre-existing IP that’s being used in a new system, and the government is free to distribute that IP to whomever it chooses with no compensation…that’s a very tough business case.
The problems are always time and necessity. The US military needs an absolute right-to-repair under both peacetime and combat circumstances and needs to receive appropriate training and enabling materials to effectively do so. It’s either that or follow the lead of the Royal Navy which put the Prince of Wales to sea with civilian shipyard workers still aboard to complete their work when she was pressed into the Bismarck fight.
Protection of IP is a separate issue. I don’t think surrender of all IP rights is part of standard military procurement contracts. If you know otherwise, please educate us and provide some specifics.
“I don’t think surrender of all IP rights is part of standard military procurement contracts.”
As I stated below, I can’t give details on a public forum, but yeah, it’s happened multiple times on large contracts over the last decade. And there’s been pushback. Of the examples I’m aware of, it might result in a potential contractor dropping out of a project, or the terms changing between draft and final RFP, or a company deciding to swallow the bitter pill and bid anyway. I haven’t seen any consistency.
That IP was developed under government contract, I would expect. So are the “Big-Parma” pills pushers. All such IP should be Open Source, unless security classification prevents it.
You are wrong, at least in the defense arena.
Many defense contractors do a lot of development totally on their own dime. This tends to be (a) stuff that has broad applicability across multiple programs, and (b) stuff that is considered to be a competitive advantage.
Some government contracts specify that all work done under the contract must be provided under “government purpose rights” where the government is pretty much free to do whatever they want with it. Generally no problem. If the contractor brings in their own IP to a program, they must clearly delineate the boundaries between company IP and work done under the program.
Companies are generally ok with giving the customer restricted rights to the company’s IP, but often the DoD/DoW has been very unhappy when contractors bring in a lot of IP, because the gov’t wants to own everything. But you can’t have it both ways – the customer saves money when a contractor has a lot of pre-existing IP that is immediately applicable to the new product, and the gov’t is fine not having to pay for already existing components. But insisting on full GPR on stuff they didn’t pay for, with no compensation to the company that did the development on its own money, is wrong. And that’s been part of the T&Cs for multiple contracts over the last decade (I can’t quote chapter and verse in a public forum).
In construction, I will take a piece of equipment with less ability in exchange for ease of maintenance and repairs. Mine is not life or death as in military. It is profit or bankruptcy past a certain point. Injectors leaking on a Caterpillar excavator this week. 5 side nut on theme that no normal wrench fits.
In weapons history, a lot of people dead from equipment failure in critical situations that couldn’t be instantly repaired.