[Gllug] Government IT projects and wasted money

[Philip Hands]

On Fri, 17 Jun 2011 17:30:07 +0100, John G Walker <johngeoffreywalker at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> 
> 
> On Fri, 17 Jun 2011 08:46:46 +0100 Jon Fautley <jon.fautley at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> 
> > That's one of the big arguments for the Government outsourcing as
> > much as possible to the private sector.
> > 
> > The grand idea is that by passing the work to the private sector,
> > existing work can be reused, and the government can leverage the
> > skills and resources not typically available to them for the reasons
> > you listed above.
> > 
> > Unfortunately, what sounds like a good idea in practise rarely is due
> > to the ineptitude of Government procurement, contracts, etc. It's
> > also far too easy for the private sector to rip off the government :(
> 
> It also duplicates the problem, since private companies do not share
> their code with one another. So company A has a problem and produces a
> solution, but does not  let its  competitors know  what it has done.
> When company B has the same problem it has to start again from
> scratch.

True until you ask both companies to provide a solution based on Free
Software, at which point, if they chose different solutions, that
indicates that there is no clear best of breed for that application, so
it's fine to have a selection, but if there is an obvious winner, most
companies will offer it, and then at least all their bug fixes an
enhancements to the upstream Free Software will be pooled, even if the
local customisations are not.

The companies that are bad at cooperating in the Free Software world
will have to carry more support costs, so at last people will be
punished rather than rewarded for heading towards vendor lock-in.

Cheers, Phil.
-- 
|)|  Philip Hands [+44 (0)20 8530 9560]    http://www.hands.com/
|-|  HANDS.COM Ltd.                    http://www.uk.debian.org/
|(|  10 Onslow Gardens, South Woodford, London  E18 1NE  ENGLAND
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