23 ms·

Lessons from open source in the Mexican government

328 points by signa11 2y ago

timewizard 2y ago
> The team took advantage of the shift to restructure the database "because we found that our storage provider was being a little bit naughty", storing the data three or four times in order to charge more money. This is the worst kind of graft and should result in criminal charges. The software development industry is still in a nascent stage and our tools are great but professional standards are still undeveloped. > Technology is often seen as the problem, he said, but he generally found that the problems were due to using obsolete technology and a lack of knowledge about the data being handled. There is often no documentation of the data and its structure, coupled with no understanding of that by the people in charge of it. Poor leadership in the agencies is another barrier; there needs to be a champion for a change of this sort, who understands what needs to be done and properly assigns people to work on it. Oh. Well. Precisely.
- vlovich123 2y ago
  I don’t disagree with the other points but: > storing the data three or four times in order to charge more money. Given that they’re not disputing that it was being stored that many times, then it’s plausible the vendor was using replication as their error recovery strategy which isn’t an invalid choice. Erasure coding is a more difficult alternative to implement. This is too short a sentence with too little detail to draw any actual conclusion from. Heck, maybe the software even had a configuration option but there was no in-house expertise to configure it properly.
wjholden 2y ago
This was a pleasant and encouraging article to read. I do think that open source is slowly growing in traditional enterprises, although I think recent interest in cloud computing and artificial intelligence has pushed a lot of software contracting out of the company. Open source migrations might become harder in the future when the enterprise no longer controls their own databases and models.
bruce511 2y ago
The article uses the phrase "no brainer" but then explains why it very much requires brainer when making IT decisions. License costs are a factor, yes, but they are not the only cost, and in most cases not the significant one. In some cases the offerings are similar enough that it moves the needle. PostgreSQL for example is a good candidate- Oracle is expensive, and the number of people interacting with it is limited. Plus the fundamentals of Oracle and PostgreSQL are more-or-less the same. On the other extreme the cost of training and support dwarfs the license cost. If all staff come with knowing how to use say Windows and Excel,but require training and support for say Linux Desktop and Libre Office, then the "free" thing costs more. It's no accident that OSS has done better on the backend than the front end. Success for OSS means putting the right product in the right place, taking all things (not just license cost) into account. (Aside: corruption is a red herring, corrupt officials and companies can be corrupt regardless of software license.)
- thaumasiotes 2y ago
  > uses the phrase "no brainer" but then explains why it very much requires brainer The structure of the phrase is [[no brain]er], not [no [brainer]]. See https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-er https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-er , sense 7/8.
  - hiddencost 2y ago
    It's word play.
  - spit2wind 2y ago
    Exactly, that's the whole point of the article. The second sentence says that, > While open source seems like a "no-brainer", it turns out that governments can be surprisingly resistant to using FOSS for a variety of reasons.
    - thaumasiotes 2y ago
      Did you mean to reply to someone else?
huijzer 2y ago
I found this part interesting: > González Waite said that all of the large proprietary software companies ""are big bullies"". He has been called into the US embassy and been threatened because Mexico was using technology that was not from the US; those threats were dialed back when he explained that the government also used software and services from Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Various companies use the US government to bully other countries, but they also use license audits as a reaction to projects that move to open-source software. Every time a successful switch happened, ""six months later there was an audit""; having the right legal team helps defend against those tactics, he said. It matches also what I heard from someone working for the Dutch government. He said that whenever they needed a new software system, that Microsoft would send multiple consultants for "free" which all could "help" the transition to a new service from Microsoft.
- pjmlp 2y ago
  Meanwhile, all major OEMs, and OS vendors routinely use BSDs and Linux distributions in some form, yet it is the same business as usual as 30 years ago, reverse engineering hardware support. The only "Linux Desktop" ready desktops and laptops to find at local shopping mall for normies are Android and ChromeOS devices, likewise in out-of-the-box experience for hardware support for peripherals.
  - Smithalicious 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - pjmlp 2y ago
      I guess, makes you happy?
  - zabzonk 2y ago
    Do you think that calling people "normies" is at all useful?
    - pjmlp 2y ago
looofooo0 2y ago
Economic network theory: "Economists who have studied the software industry concluded that the value of a software business is about equal to the total costs of its customers switching out to the competition; both are equal to the net present value of future payments from the customers to the software vendor. This means that an incumbent in a maturing market, such as Microsoft with its Office product, can grow faster than the market only if it can find ways to lock in its customers more tightly. There are some ifs and buts that hedge this theory around, but the basic idea is well known to software industry executives. This explains Bill G's comment that `We came at this thinking about music, but then we realized that e-mail and documents were far more interesting domains'."
- lifeisstillgood 2y ago
  Ohhh - do you have a link ? That is interesting… Also it strikes me that as a developer my investment of learning is more in code d So it’s easier to switch
  - looofooo0 2y ago
    https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/archive/rja14/tcpa-faq.html https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/archive/rja14/tcpa-faq.html Quote from here and the idea is from this https://www.researchgate.net/publication/200167344_Information_Rules_A_Strategic_Guide_to_The_Network_Economy https://www.researchgate.net/publication/200167344_Informati...
    - masfuerte 2y ago
      This is tangential, but seeing a Ross Anderson article reminded me... Does anyone know if <https://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/ https://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/> is permanently gone or just temporarily down?
      - looofooo0 2y ago
        He died last year, so it is gone I guess.
caycep 2y ago
I live near the Pasadena/LA area and wish I had heard of SCALE22x earlier!
raffraffraff 2y ago
> The team took advantage of the shift to restructure the database ""because we found that our storage provider was being a little bit naughty"", storing the data three or four times in order to charge more money Uh... Without knowing the exact details, my first thought that "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing"
pessimizer 2y ago
> It turned out that various contracted companies had corruptly put the software licenses they bought for the government into their own names, leading to a lock-in for their services. This is a dirty trick I ran into in [US] state procurement, in a state known for widespread corruption. It's basically a no-show job where you just hold a bunch of long-term contracts for the state, and claim a monthly "support" fee for doing it. Even worse, you got to negotiate those contracts (and set up your kickbacks or self-dealing.) Bonus points for needing to call the contractor in order to have the contractor call support, and the contractor taking a fee for doing it. Endless avenues for corruption with a setup like this.
pritambarhate 2y ago
I think at this moment all governments should start funding the open source foundations so that the foundations can train as well as retain good programming talent to keep the important open source software maintained. I think it will serve better in the long term to the government departments as well as the citizens.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- NewJazz 2y ago
  If this is how we do it, there is the glaring vulnerability that a rogue administration could yank the rug on all these organizations and leave them scrambling for funding.
  - r14c 2y ago
    wouldn't that make the glaring vulnerability the constitution?
    - NewJazz 2y ago
      You mean a piece of paper with no inherent enforcement mechanisms?
      - r14c 2y ago
        the agreement that it represents. was that not clear?
specialist 2y ago
My slogan for using FOSS for govt is "citizen owned software". At one time, I anticipated the rise of FOSS consortiums. Jurisdictions with similar needs would join together to share the cost and risks. Canada, Mexico, USA each have 1,000s of juridictions. Surely at any one time there's a handful planning a technology refresh of some domain. One easy example I know of is property tax administration. There's a bunch of counties of similar size all doing the same thing, but all running off in separate directions. Vendor options are complicated, expensive, and have lock-in. Surely it'd be beneficial to pool their resources and own their stack? Another is election administration. US counties used to do all it themselves. Candidate filings, voter registration, poll books, yadda, yadda. Now it's all outsourced. Lower service for higher prices. (The "certification" process was captured, serving to protect incumbents. Natch.) Any way. I was a grunt for a member of a consortium FOSS project. It was awful. "The Logic of Collective Action" explained a great deal of the pathology. Also, Byran Cantrill's quote (wrt Open Solaris) about "having the freedom but not the power to fork" was spot on for our project. Any way. Does any one have examples or game plan or vision for realizing more FOSS in govt? I'm not quite ready to give up on the dream.
firejake308 2y ago
> Another part of the project was to move away from Oracle and to PostgreSQL. That change led to various threats and intimidation from the company when it learned of the change, González Waite said. "They told me that the entire passport system of the country was going to fall down" and that it would be his fault that Mexico could not let anyone into or out of the country. "Guess what? That didn't happen." Larry Ellison, never change. It'll be interesting to see how they ruin TikTok if their bid succeeds.
- grg0 2y ago
  The cockroach is one of the most resilient species. Some of them are even resistant to fire and can survive for several minutes without oxygen.
  - sokoloff 2y ago
    Humans can survive for several minutes without oxygen as well.
grg0 2y ago
Damn. I was aware US technology companies were parasitic, but this article really sheds light on the extent of it. No wonder they hate free software so much.
ptsd_dalmatian 2y ago
Question I ask my self a lot, how much my government spends a month for Microsoft stuff. This money could go to education and health care, which both are in terrible shape. Friend who works for government tell me that it’s almost impossible to find out this number. That’s how “transparent” it is.

328 points by signa11 2y ago

> The team took advantage of the shift to restructure the database "because we found that our storage provider was being a little bit naughty", storing the data three or four times in order to charge more money. This is the worst kind of graft and should result in criminal charges. The software development industry is still in a nascent stage and our tools are great but professional standards are still undeveloped. > Technology is often seen as the problem, he said, but he generally found that the problems were due to using obsolete technology and a lack of knowledge about the data being handled. There is often no documentation of the data and its structure, coupled with no understanding of that by the people in charge of it. Poor leadership in the agencies is another barrier; there needs to be a champion for a change of this sort, who understands what needs to be done and properly assigns people to work on it. Oh. Well. Precisely.

vlovich123 2y ago
I don’t disagree with the other points but: > storing the data three or four times in order to charge more money. Given that they’re not disputing that it was being stored that many times, then it’s plausible the vendor was using replication as their error recovery strategy which isn’t an invalid choice. Erasure coding is a more difficult alternative to implement. This is too short a sentence with too little detail to draw any actual conclusion from. Heck, maybe the software even had a configuration option but there was no in-house expertise to configure it properly.

wjholden 2y ago

This was a pleasant and encouraging article to read. I do think that open source is slowly growing in traditional enterprises, although I think recent interest in cloud computing and artificial intelligence has pushed a lot of software contracting out of the company. Open source migrations might become harder in the future when the enterprise no longer controls their own databases and models.

bruce511 2y ago

The article uses the phrase "no brainer" but then explains why it very much requires brainer when making IT decisions. License costs are a factor, yes, but they are not the only cost, and in most cases not the significant one. In some cases the offerings are similar enough that it moves the needle. PostgreSQL for example is a good candidate- Oracle is expensive, and the number of people interacting with it is limited. Plus the fundamentals of Oracle and PostgreSQL are more-or-less the same. On the other extreme the cost of training and support dwarfs the license cost. If all staff come with knowing how to use say Windows and Excel,but require training and support for say Linux Desktop and Libre Office, then the "free" thing costs more. It's no accident that OSS has done better on the backend than the front end. Success for OSS means putting the right product in the right place, taking all things (not just license cost) into account. (Aside: corruption is a red herring, corrupt officials and companies can be corrupt regardless of software license.)

thaumasiotes 2y ago
> uses the phrase "no brainer" but then explains why it very much requires brainer The structure of the phrase is [[no brain]er], not [no [brainer]]. See https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-er https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-er , sense 7/8.
- hiddencost 2y ago
  It's word play.
- spit2wind 2y ago
  Exactly, that's the whole point of the article. The second sentence says that, > While open source seems like a "no-brainer", it turns out that governments can be surprisingly resistant to using FOSS for a variety of reasons.
  - thaumasiotes 2y ago
    Did you mean to reply to someone else?

huijzer 2y ago

I found this part interesting: > González Waite said that all of the large proprietary software companies ""are big bullies"". He has been called into the US embassy and been threatened because Mexico was using technology that was not from the US; those threats were dialed back when he explained that the government also used software and services from Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Various companies use the US government to bully other countries, but they also use license audits as a reaction to projects that move to open-source software. Every time a successful switch happened, ""six months later there was an audit""; having the right legal team helps defend against those tactics, he said. It matches also what I heard from someone working for the Dutch government. He said that whenever they needed a new software system, that Microsoft would send multiple consultants for "free" which all could "help" the transition to a new service from Microsoft.

pjmlp 2y ago
Meanwhile, all major OEMs, and OS vendors routinely use BSDs and Linux distributions in some form, yet it is the same business as usual as 30 years ago, reverse engineering hardware support. The only "Linux Desktop" ready desktops and laptops to find at local shopping mall for normies are Android and ChromeOS devices, likewise in out-of-the-box experience for hardware support for peripherals.
- Smithalicious 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    I guess, makes you happy?
- zabzonk 2y ago
  Do you think that calling people "normies" is at all useful?
  - pjmlp 2y ago

looofooo0 2y ago

Economic network theory: "Economists who have studied the software industry concluded that the value of a software business is about equal to the total costs of its customers switching out to the competition; both are equal to the net present value of future payments from the customers to the software vendor. This means that an incumbent in a maturing market, such as Microsoft with its Office product, can grow faster than the market only if it can find ways to lock in its customers more tightly. There are some ifs and buts that hedge this theory around, but the basic idea is well known to software industry executives. This explains Bill G's comment that `We came at this thinking about music, but then we realized that e-mail and documents were far more interesting domains'."

lifeisstillgood 2y ago
Ohhh - do you have a link ? That is interesting… Also it strikes me that as a developer my investment of learning is more in code d So it’s easier to switch
- looofooo0 2y ago
  https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/archive/rja14/tcpa-faq.html https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/archive/rja14/tcpa-faq.html Quote from here and the idea is from this https://www.researchgate.net/publication/200167344_Information_Rules_A_Strategic_Guide_to_The_Network_Economy https://www.researchgate.net/publication/200167344_Informati...
  - masfuerte 2y ago
    This is tangential, but seeing a Ross Anderson article reminded me... Does anyone know if <https://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/ https://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/> is permanently gone or just temporarily down?
    - looofooo0 2y ago
      He died last year, so it is gone I guess.

caycep 2y ago

I live near the Pasadena/LA area and wish I had heard of SCALE22x earlier!

raffraffraff 2y ago

> The team took advantage of the shift to restructure the database ""because we found that our storage provider was being a little bit naughty"", storing the data three or four times in order to charge more money Uh... Without knowing the exact details, my first thought that "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing"

pessimizer 2y ago

> It turned out that various contracted companies had corruptly put the software licenses they bought for the government into their own names, leading to a lock-in for their services. This is a dirty trick I ran into in [US] state procurement, in a state known for widespread corruption. It's basically a no-show job where you just hold a bunch of long-term contracts for the state, and claim a monthly "support" fee for doing it. Even worse, you got to negotiate those contracts (and set up your kickbacks or self-dealing.) Bonus points for needing to call the contractor in order to have the contractor call support, and the contractor taking a fee for doing it. Endless avenues for corruption with a setup like this.

pritambarhate 2y ago

I think at this moment all governments should start funding the open source foundations so that the foundations can train as well as retain good programming talent to keep the important open source software maintained. I think it will serve better in the long term to the government departments as well as the citizens.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
NewJazz 2y ago
If this is how we do it, there is the glaring vulnerability that a rogue administration could yank the rug on all these organizations and leave them scrambling for funding.
- r14c 2y ago
  wouldn't that make the glaring vulnerability the constitution?
  - NewJazz 2y ago
    You mean a piece of paper with no inherent enforcement mechanisms?
    - r14c 2y ago
      the agreement that it represents. was that not clear?

specialist 2y ago

My slogan for using FOSS for govt is "citizen owned software". At one time, I anticipated the rise of FOSS consortiums. Jurisdictions with similar needs would join together to share the cost and risks. Canada, Mexico, USA each have 1,000s of juridictions. Surely at any one time there's a handful planning a technology refresh of some domain. One easy example I know of is property tax administration. There's a bunch of counties of similar size all doing the same thing, but all running off in separate directions. Vendor options are complicated, expensive, and have lock-in. Surely it'd be beneficial to pool their resources and own their stack? Another is election administration. US counties used to do all it themselves. Candidate filings, voter registration, poll books, yadda, yadda. Now it's all outsourced. Lower service for higher prices. (The "certification" process was captured, serving to protect incumbents. Natch.) Any way. I was a grunt for a member of a consortium FOSS project. It was awful. "The Logic of Collective Action" explained a great deal of the pathology. Also, Byran Cantrill's quote (wrt Open Solaris) about "having the freedom but not the power to fork" was spot on for our project. Any way. Does any one have examples or game plan or vision for realizing more FOSS in govt? I'm not quite ready to give up on the dream.

firejake308 2y ago

> Another part of the project was to move away from Oracle and to PostgreSQL. That change led to various threats and intimidation from the company when it learned of the change, González Waite said. "They told me that the entire passport system of the country was going to fall down" and that it would be his fault that Mexico could not let anyone into or out of the country. "Guess what? That didn't happen." Larry Ellison, never change. It'll be interesting to see how they ruin TikTok if their bid succeeds.

grg0 2y ago
The cockroach is one of the most resilient species. Some of them are even resistant to fire and can survive for several minutes without oxygen.
- sokoloff 2y ago
  Humans can survive for several minutes without oxygen as well.

grg0 2y ago

Damn. I was aware US technology companies were parasitic, but this article really sheds light on the extent of it. No wonder they hate free software so much.

ptsd_dalmatian 2y ago

Question I ask my self a lot, how much my government spends a month for Microsoft stuff. This money could go to education and health care, which both are in terrible shape. Friend who works for government tell me that it’s almost impossible to find out this number. That’s how “transparent” it is.