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A comment on The U.S. tried to build a new fleet of ventilators. Parent comment

Re:The U.S. tried to build a new fleet of ventilators by maxerickson on Sunday March 29, 2020 @03:31PM (#22721892)
Yes, that's one thing contracts are used for, to specify what you get in exchange for payments, in a durable way.
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Re:The U.S. tried to build a new fleet of ventilators by pdonis on Sunday March 29, 2020 @03:33PM (#22721912)
But the government agreed to cancel the contract at the big company's request. I don't see how the deliverable being the design instead of the ventilator itself would have changed that.
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Re:The U.S. tried to build a new fleet of ventilators by maxerickson on Sunday March 29, 2020 @03:46PM (#22722040)
Sure.

If I had a government slush fund to develop a low cost ventilator, I would try to structure the payments in the contract to be based on milestones with concrete deliverables. Not a tenuous agreement to buy a bunch of ventilators at below market price (it's implied in the article that the sales to the stockpile wouldn't justify the project for the company).

There's of course a possibility that the government wrote the most aggressive contract they could find someone to work on. But I doubt that is what happened.

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Re:The U.S. tried to build a new fleet of ventilators by pdonis on Sunday March 29, 2020 @03:50PM (#22722077)
> There's of course a possibility that the government wrote the most aggressive contract they could find someone to work on. But I doubt that is what happened.

Why do you doubt that?

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Re:The U.S. tried to build a new fleet of ventilators by burfog on Sunday March 29, 2020 @03:58PM (#22722159)
Agreement to cancel could be made conditional upon publishing the design and releasing it into the public domain.

If the big company detests that idea, well, they don't get out of the original contract.

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Re:The U.S. tried to build a new fleet of ventilators by pdonis on Sunday March 29, 2020 @05:23PM (#22722883)
> Agreement to cancel could be made conditional upon publishing the design and releasing it into the public domain.

It probably could have been (that would depend on the details of the terms of the original contract), but it wasn't.

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