7 ms·

Governments should develop and run opensource systems. That way different governments can collaborate to build better systems through open innovation. Not wasti

by acd 6y ago

Governments should develop and run opensource systems. That way different governments can collaborate to build better systems through open innovation. Not wasting tax payers money on closed source. I bet tax and pension systems have the same basic requirements cross countries with some local specifics.

mikekchar 6y ago
While I completely agree with you, there is a compelling argument for governments spending tax payer money on goods from local companies rather than competing with them. Of course, I don't think I would class MS as a "local company" for Munich ;-). I'm just saying that there are lots of reasonable points of view on this topic.
- tonyedgecombe 6y ago
  In the UK we outsource to the cheapest provider. More bang for the buck but it doesn't seem very holistic and appears to encourage corruption.
- em-bee 6y ago
  how is hiring local developers as employees any different from outsourcing to a local company? if the city is developing software then it is surely something that doesn't already exist, and when they do they are also not selling it, so i see no competition there. if the goal is to create jobs, then that also happens either way. i don't see the problem.
- toshk 6y ago
  I'm working on some projects for the city of Amsterdam, by default all we develop is open source. But whether this is a legal issue is actually an open debate, in some specific cases companies could potentially sue Amsterdam for sharing solutions with other governments and thereby "competing" with the market. How a judge would rule is not clear. But this is something they are aware of and it's a risk. It seems to also be connected to the way the project is shared. As far as I know they are looking into changing the law on the national level so this stops being a problem. Also strangely enough, I've been told, as soon as the project gets funded by the EU, this law is not applicable anymore. Open source means published on github, not many projects are actually properly documented.
- Brian_K_White 6y ago
  Same governmemt can spend the same money within the same local economy by paying programmers. There is no valid reason and not that many "reasonable points of view" about paying a private company 5000 times over for the same piece of software, and still not owning it or being able to get full functionality out of it or being able to see into it or your taxpayers (who are subject to it's operation) being able to see into it, vs paying programmers to write the same thing 1 times over and then you DO own it and can get full functionality out of it and can see into it, and every town in your whole country can use it with no legal burden, no audits, no broken license mangers... And tomorrow, instead of paying for another 100 copies of the same license yet again, you can pay those programmers to make what you have even better or build the next new thing. There is no valid reason to just pay rent to anyone for nothing, even if they are a local company. That's not a good enough reason.
luckylion 6y ago
That would also put the risk on the government though. What if their software is shit? Tax money wasted. Buying software has the benefit that the manufacturer carries the risk. Imho, they should set standards, APIs, file formats etc to enable competition and keep vendor lock-in to a minimum.
- em-bee 6y ago
  which risk? a software company is going to make sure that their risk is covered financially. so if the software turns out to be useless, they will sure find a way to shift the blame and get paid anyways.
  - luckylion 6y ago
    Unless it's paid-to-build, the software company's risk is creating the software and then not being able to sell it because a different software is better. Communal software isn't always custom-built, the majority is normal off-the-shelf stuff, just focused on that niche. My involvement is limited to a small city a few years ago, that may be different in a large city as Munich if they have lots of custom requirements they don't share with other cities.
    - em-bee 6y ago
      if the software already exists, then it's not a risk question, but one of cost. the buyer can not shift the risk to the seller. how would that go? put out a tender for a completed solution and then wait until someone builds the software on their own risk, hoping to win the tender? that's like a designer competition, and those have been considered unfair.
      - luckylion 6y ago
        Software doesn't just "exist", it's created. And spending time and/or money on creating means taking on the risk to fail. Again, they're not putting out contracts for bidding for every software they want, just like most enterprise software isn't custom made. They buy lots of software from companies. Those companies have competitors, so cities can choose which software to buy. Those companies shoulder the risk of not being chosen and having wasted the money. If the cities built it themselves, they would not be able to choose who to buy from. And if their self-built software sucks, they've wasted money and have a shitty software. One that they may not be able to replace, because there's no longer a market for that kind of software. Public endeavors into building things (airports, train stations, rapid train lines etc) in the recent decades in Germany does not predict a bright future for these kinds of things.
NalNezumi 6y ago
>Governments should develop and run opensource systems. I'm for this proposal too, but for different reason. opensource system can create much needed transparency in government project and organization effort. In my home country the unemployment agency spent atrocious amount of money to create an unusable job-posting app; something private companies do for fraction of the cost. More surprisingly, they doubled down on it; instead of scrapping it when it wasn't delivering. My guess it that some nepotism/favoritism was at play, and if the project was at least open source it could've been examined by others.
- cosmodisk 6y ago
  Same in my country.Simple MVC apps serving not so big customer base ends up costing tens of millions and don't work properly.
skinkestek 6y ago
> Governments should develop and run opensource... Happy to say that I am working on such a project. Heavy (and unnecessary NDA) so I cannot say in cleartext but it is in use in one Nordic country already, it is opensource and already I hear that the Dutch found it to be a good starting point and probably will be using it too. Some more details, the company I work for is owned by one country but doesn't compete as much as cooperate - I am a consultant from another company. And we both use open source software and libraries and publish as open source most of what we create. I hate it that I can't talk about it.
- yorwba 6y ago
  It's open source but you can't talk about it? How does that even work?
  - computerfriend 6y ago
    It depends on the motives. E.g. they hire Palentir but don't want to have those bad associations, so NDA the Palentir contractors working on it.
    - skinkestek 6y ago
      I'm not working for Palantir, what we work on is linked to one of: - capacity planning for renewables (hydro power) - streamlining mass transit - large scale collection and recycling of bottles - search and rescue operations in the North Sea - education as for why the NDA, my best guess is because "they could". Someone should tell them they are losing out on some great publisity and goodwill.
      - em-bee 6y ago
        is the code already public? or will it be published when it's done?
        skinkestek 6y ago
open-source-ux 6y ago
It is happening, albeit in a bit of a patchy, ad-hoc way. One example is International Design in Government: https://international.gov-design.com/ https://international.gov-design.com/
Merem 6y ago
Absolutely. Where I live, the city administration sent a survey to people, asking what projects to tackle, where to save money/increase income etc etc. One of the options in the "saving money" category was going open source. You can bet it was one of the things I chose and in the end, it ranked 3rd which is not bad. Will be interesting to see how the administration will vote on it.
cxr 6y ago
This is the basis of https://publiccode.eu/ https://publiccode.eu/
partiallypro 6y ago
Is there evidence that governments are saving that much more with open source? You'd still have to pay developers...and some cities are going to freeload off others to avoid overhead costs.
- nelaboras 6y ago
  It's a complex issue. There are some calculations and they can go both ways, depending in what and how you calculate. E.g. you could consider training costs - but training costs are one-off for a change, not eternal. Or you can consider coding costs, but they might vary massively from region to region and depending on how (in)competent the procurement goes and how the local market works. Estonia is a country that seems to have figures this out to an immense degree, creating most of the infrastructure themselves and then tendering small-scale procurements for small parts of the system and sometimes allow private competition - but always with government-set data standards and often more on interfaces etc. To add one other angle: what is cheaper, paying 5 million to a company in Redmond yp provide licenses for opersting systems and officd software, or 10 million to a number of local companies to set up and adapt a slightly less refined open source tool for the local needs? In one scenario the money leaves the local economy, in other the city might spend more money but the money stays local and is used to buy houses or sandwiches, pay handymen or bus tickets or taxes. Where is the long term cost/benefit/ratio higher?

by acd 6y ago

mikekchar 6y ago

While I completely agree with you, there is a compelling argument for governments spending tax payer money on goods from local companies rather than competing with them. Of course, I don't think I would class MS as a "local company" for Munich ;-). I'm just saying that there are lots of reasonable points of view on this topic.

tonyedgecombe 6y ago
In the UK we outsource to the cheapest provider. More bang for the buck but it doesn't seem very holistic and appears to encourage corruption.
em-bee 6y ago
how is hiring local developers as employees any different from outsourcing to a local company? if the city is developing software then it is surely something that doesn't already exist, and when they do they are also not selling it, so i see no competition there. if the goal is to create jobs, then that also happens either way. i don't see the problem.
toshk 6y ago
I'm working on some projects for the city of Amsterdam, by default all we develop is open source. But whether this is a legal issue is actually an open debate, in some specific cases companies could potentially sue Amsterdam for sharing solutions with other governments and thereby "competing" with the market. How a judge would rule is not clear. But this is something they are aware of and it's a risk. It seems to also be connected to the way the project is shared. As far as I know they are looking into changing the law on the national level so this stops being a problem. Also strangely enough, I've been told, as soon as the project gets funded by the EU, this law is not applicable anymore. Open source means published on github, not many projects are actually properly documented.
Brian_K_White 6y ago
Same governmemt can spend the same money within the same local economy by paying programmers. There is no valid reason and not that many "reasonable points of view" about paying a private company 5000 times over for the same piece of software, and still not owning it or being able to get full functionality out of it or being able to see into it or your taxpayers (who are subject to it's operation) being able to see into it, vs paying programmers to write the same thing 1 times over and then you DO own it and can get full functionality out of it and can see into it, and every town in your whole country can use it with no legal burden, no audits, no broken license mangers... And tomorrow, instead of paying for another 100 copies of the same license yet again, you can pay those programmers to make what you have even better or build the next new thing. There is no valid reason to just pay rent to anyone for nothing, even if they are a local company. That's not a good enough reason.

luckylion 6y ago

That would also put the risk on the government though. What if their software is shit? Tax money wasted. Buying software has the benefit that the manufacturer carries the risk. Imho, they should set standards, APIs, file formats etc to enable competition and keep vendor lock-in to a minimum.

em-bee 6y ago
which risk? a software company is going to make sure that their risk is covered financially. so if the software turns out to be useless, they will sure find a way to shift the blame and get paid anyways.
- luckylion 6y ago
  Unless it's paid-to-build, the software company's risk is creating the software and then not being able to sell it because a different software is better. Communal software isn't always custom-built, the majority is normal off-the-shelf stuff, just focused on that niche. My involvement is limited to a small city a few years ago, that may be different in a large city as Munich if they have lots of custom requirements they don't share with other cities.
  - em-bee 6y ago
    if the software already exists, then it's not a risk question, but one of cost. the buyer can not shift the risk to the seller. how would that go? put out a tender for a completed solution and then wait until someone builds the software on their own risk, hoping to win the tender? that's like a designer competition, and those have been considered unfair.
    - luckylion 6y ago
      Software doesn't just "exist", it's created. And spending time and/or money on creating means taking on the risk to fail. Again, they're not putting out contracts for bidding for every software they want, just like most enterprise software isn't custom made. They buy lots of software from companies. Those companies have competitors, so cities can choose which software to buy. Those companies shoulder the risk of not being chosen and having wasted the money. If the cities built it themselves, they would not be able to choose who to buy from. And if their self-built software sucks, they've wasted money and have a shitty software. One that they may not be able to replace, because there's no longer a market for that kind of software. Public endeavors into building things (airports, train stations, rapid train lines etc) in the recent decades in Germany does not predict a bright future for these kinds of things.

NalNezumi 6y ago

>Governments should develop and run opensource systems. I'm for this proposal too, but for different reason. opensource system can create much needed transparency in government project and organization effort. In my home country the unemployment agency spent atrocious amount of money to create an unusable job-posting app; something private companies do for fraction of the cost. More surprisingly, they doubled down on it; instead of scrapping it when it wasn't delivering. My guess it that some nepotism/favoritism was at play, and if the project was at least open source it could've been examined by others.

cosmodisk 6y ago
Same in my country.Simple MVC apps serving not so big customer base ends up costing tens of millions and don't work properly.

skinkestek 6y ago

> Governments should develop and run opensource... Happy to say that I am working on such a project. Heavy (and unnecessary NDA) so I cannot say in cleartext but it is in use in one Nordic country already, it is opensource and already I hear that the Dutch found it to be a good starting point and probably will be using it too. Some more details, the company I work for is owned by one country but doesn't compete as much as cooperate - I am a consultant from another company. And we both use open source software and libraries and publish as open source most of what we create. I hate it that I can't talk about it.

yorwba 6y ago
It's open source but you can't talk about it? How does that even work?
- computerfriend 6y ago
  It depends on the motives. E.g. they hire Palentir but don't want to have those bad associations, so NDA the Palentir contractors working on it.
  - skinkestek 6y ago
    I'm not working for Palantir, what we work on is linked to one of: - capacity planning for renewables (hydro power) - streamlining mass transit - large scale collection and recycling of bottles - search and rescue operations in the North Sea - education as for why the NDA, my best guess is because "they could". Someone should tell them they are losing out on some great publisity and goodwill.
    - em-bee 6y ago
      is the code already public? or will it be published when it's done?
      - skinkestek 6y ago

open-source-ux 6y ago

It is happening, albeit in a bit of a patchy, ad-hoc way. One example is International Design in Government: https://international.gov-design.com/ https://international.gov-design.com/

Merem 6y ago

Absolutely. Where I live, the city administration sent a survey to people, asking what projects to tackle, where to save money/increase income etc etc. One of the options in the "saving money" category was going open source. You can bet it was one of the things I chose and in the end, it ranked 3rd which is not bad. Will be interesting to see how the administration will vote on it.

cxr 6y ago

This is the basis of https://publiccode.eu/ https://publiccode.eu/

partiallypro 6y ago

Is there evidence that governments are saving that much more with open source? You'd still have to pay developers...and some cities are going to freeload off others to avoid overhead costs.

nelaboras 6y ago
It's a complex issue. There are some calculations and they can go both ways, depending in what and how you calculate. E.g. you could consider training costs - but training costs are one-off for a change, not eternal. Or you can consider coding costs, but they might vary massively from region to region and depending on how (in)competent the procurement goes and how the local market works. Estonia is a country that seems to have figures this out to an immense degree, creating most of the infrastructure themselves and then tendering small-scale procurements for small parts of the system and sometimes allow private competition - but always with government-set data standards and often more on interfaces etc. To add one other angle: what is cheaper, paying 5 million to a company in Redmond yp provide licenses for opersting systems and officd software, or 10 million to a number of local companies to set up and adapt a slightly less refined open source tool for the local needs? In one scenario the money leaves the local economy, in other the city might spend more money but the money stays local and is used to buy houses or sandwiches, pay handymen or bus tickets or taxes. Where is the long term cost/benefit/ratio higher?