Private sector dev checking in: (Very grumpily checking in, after reading some of TFA) This really couldn't be more untrue, and I say this both as an eng in my

Private sector dev checking in: (Very grumpily checking in, after reading some of TFA) This really couldn't be more untrue, and I say this both as an eng in my day to day, and as a washed up data scientist who was once tasked with investigating this exact question. Open source continues to be an extremely compelling option (and oftentimes THE idiomatic option) for large swaths of common tasks. I could really only believe his assertions if his data is so twisted out of the realm of a kind interpretation. I tried to read through but at every paragraph I was met by a wall of handwaving which aligns far more strongly with Oracle's incentive to sell support packages than any reasonable interpretation of reality. Some snippets: - "Government should attempt to emulate the fast-paced innovation of Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley is comprised of IT vendors most of which fail. " Do they fail because of their tech choices or their strategic choices? - "Instead, the Government should attempt to emulate the best-practices of large private-sector Fortune 50 customers, which have competed, evaluated, procured and secured commercial technology successfully." In my experience, the most technologically savvy F100's are all VERY familiar with utilizing in-house dev, and as recent releases from AWS/Azure might suggest (SQL Server on linux, Aurora support for postgres/mysql, etc) OSS is a key part of this as well. - "Significant IT development expertise is not. Substantial custom software development efforts were the norm at large commercial enterprises, until it became obvious that the cost and complexity of developing technology was prohibitive, with the end-products inherently insecure and too costly to maintain long-term. " Exactly, so we started moving to _OPEN SOURCE_, but not in exclusion to the in-house expertise. (HN has seen lots of the murmurs about when this transition went south and believed that too much outsourcing at the cost of domain expertise and stability was the path to success) He later goes on to cite equifax's failure as an example of this, which I find especially entertaining because that suggests a privately developed piece of software would somehow have more eyes on it or guarantees of safety than a product as widely used as most things Apache. - "The most important skill set of CIO’s today is to critically compete and evaluate commercial alternatives to capture the benefits of innovation conducted at scale, and then to manage the implementation of those technologies efficiently." Translation: "We don't like the alternatives CIO's have been finding, because they aren't Oracle". I'm getting a bit snippy here as one might tell, so I'm going to stop reading before I start screaming at my monitor.