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In my experience as a contractor, most federal agencies are now preferring products that are built with open source software, and I think a big reason why is be
by dwater 4y ago
In my experience as a contractor, most federal agencies are now preferring products that are built with open source software, and I think a big reason why is because realistically there’s only a handful of contracting firms big enough to fulfill a lot of these $100M+ IT contracts, and the systems need to be supported for many years, so it makes it much easier if the contractor that builds a system does so in a way that one of their competitors can come in and maintain it when the first company cuts corners to boost profits after a few years.
- Jtsummers 4y agoOpen source also creates a better pathway to "organic" sustainment or emergency (I forget the term they actually use) sustainment. In organic sustainment the system is maintained by government employees. In the emergency context, it's the ability of the government to sustain a system without needing to defer to contractors in extreme circumstances. Imagine an actual total war for the US, contract negotiations take months or years even for stupidly simple work (I'm pretty sure some systems spend more in contract negotiations than the entire rest of the system costs). Open source is an effective way to ensure the government has access to all or most of the data needed to assume responsibility for the work later on. Technically the government also purchases data rights, but that part of contracts is almost always fouled up in some subtle way that makes it near useless.
- fargle 4y agoThere are so many big government IT contracts that are saddled with products like MS-SQL or worse Oracle instead of postgresql or mariadb. Big multicore M$ hyper-V with per-core pricing and so on. It's just terrible to see the $$$$$ wasted on "enterprise" stuff that isn't needed 99% of the time.