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In case of government spend it is hard for me to comprehend why almost no place in the world has fully open source gov technology. Governments everywhere spend

In case of government spend it is hard for me to comprehend why almost no place in the world has fully open source gov technology. Governments everywhere spend these insane amounts on really bad software :/

Zhyl 6y ago
The sad reality is that there just isn't enough awareness or understanding of technology within Government to make it onto the agenda. The exceptions of this are little pockets of like-minded individuals such as GDS [1] who have done some exemplary work on open sourcing tech. The downside is that much of the 'trunk' of IT (workstations, Business Software, internal systems) are still contracted out to monolithic, old-school contractors who have no incentive to innovate by non-technical procurement teams. This leads to a culture of proprietary software where the established/expensive solutions are seen as the most trustworthy and there isn't any cost to vendor lock-in or non-interoperability of systems until the next tranche of officials have taken over and all of those issues can be written off as 'legacy' and as a sunk cost. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Digital_Service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Digital_Service
- vharuck 6y ago
  As a state government worker, this jives with my experience. The ultimate beneficiaries of any budget savings or improved processes are citizens who have no idea, let alone input, about what we're doing behind the scenes. It's very hard to convince public employees to work with those people in mind. You're right, the people buying the software are even harder to convince. With no good measures of effect, they rely on what's easiest for them. So Microsoft and PDFs everywhere. Our software licenses are paid through a grant from the federal government. If we replace them with open source software, we don't get to keep the difference. So now I have licensed software like SAS and ArcGIS gathering dust on my machine while I use R and Python. And sharing software we develop is even harder. I've pushed to release code for my statistical reports. When I said researchers and other states could benefit by reusing parts, my supervisors only saw it as a liability with no benefit to us. I might try to slip it in as part of the technical notes.
mikhailt 6y ago
Well, in US, that probably is because of several reasons: 1. Lack of central organization, it's easier to work with and pay a single private company or a contractor than hiring folks and working with open source projects that usually has no legal body, no billing, etc. Hiring and working with various companies to update, maintain, and so on with many projects isn't as easy as it sounds. (True, you could hire a single company to maintain a single distro for the whole gov't to use but is it cheaper than a private solution that 80% of the market already uses?). 2. Lobbyists, they'll explain it's cheaper to hire private companies to produce and cheaper maintenance over time especially since ^. 3. A share of citizens that doesn't believe in a bigger federal govt. 4. States want to do it their own ways instead of trusting the fed govt. 5. Distrust in govt in general on all fronts.

Zhyl 6y ago

The sad reality is that there just isn't enough awareness or understanding of technology within Government to make it onto the agenda. The exceptions of this are little pockets of like-minded individuals such as GDS [1] who have done some exemplary work on open sourcing tech. The downside is that much of the 'trunk' of IT (workstations, Business Software, internal systems) are still contracted out to monolithic, old-school contractors who have no incentive to innovate by non-technical procurement teams. This leads to a culture of proprietary software where the established/expensive solutions are seen as the most trustworthy and there isn't any cost to vendor lock-in or non-interoperability of systems until the next tranche of officials have taken over and all of those issues can be written off as 'legacy' and as a sunk cost. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Digital_Service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Digital_Service

vharuck 6y ago
As a state government worker, this jives with my experience. The ultimate beneficiaries of any budget savings or improved processes are citizens who have no idea, let alone input, about what we're doing behind the scenes. It's very hard to convince public employees to work with those people in mind. You're right, the people buying the software are even harder to convince. With no good measures of effect, they rely on what's easiest for them. So Microsoft and PDFs everywhere. Our software licenses are paid through a grant from the federal government. If we replace them with open source software, we don't get to keep the difference. So now I have licensed software like SAS and ArcGIS gathering dust on my machine while I use R and Python. And sharing software we develop is even harder. I've pushed to release code for my statistical reports. When I said researchers and other states could benefit by reusing parts, my supervisors only saw it as a liability with no benefit to us. I might try to slip it in as part of the technical notes.

mikhailt 6y ago

Well, in US, that probably is because of several reasons: 1. Lack of central organization, it's easier to work with and pay a single private company or a contractor than hiring folks and working with open source projects that usually has no legal body, no billing, etc. Hiring and working with various companies to update, maintain, and so on with many projects isn't as easy as it sounds. (True, you could hire a single company to maintain a single distro for the whole gov't to use but is it cheaper than a private solution that 80% of the market already uses?). 2. Lobbyists, they'll explain it's cheaper to hire private companies to produce and cheaper maintenance over time especially since ^. 3. A share of citizens that doesn't believe in a bigger federal govt. 4. States want to do it their own ways instead of trusting the fed govt. 5. Distrust in govt in general on all fronts.