[HN Gopher] Lessons from open source in the Mexican government
___________________________________________________________________
Lessons from open source in the Mexican government
Author : signa11
Score : 265 points
Date : 2025-04-04 06:55 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (lwn.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (lwn.net)
| timewizard wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 , sense 7/8.
| hiddencost wrote:
| It's word play.
| spit2wind wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Did you mean to reply to someone else?
| looofooo0 wrote:
| "Third, there are often large costs to users from switching
| technologies, which leads to lock-in. Such markets may remain
| very profitable, even where (incompatible) competitors are very
| cheap to produce. In fact, one of the main results of network
| economic theory is that the net present value of the customer
| base should equal the total costs of their switching their
| business to a com- petitor [19]."
| rvba wrote:
| All this talk about having to train users... then the
| companies change the interfaces so much that even power users
| get confused.
|
| And why? Because the designers need to prove that they so
| something?
| motorest wrote:
| > All this talk about having to train users... then the
| companies change the interfaces so much that even power
| users get confused.
|
| I don't think this is a realistic assessment of the
| problem. Windows 11 slremains very much recognizable since
| the Windows 7 days, and the transition from Windows 10 to
| Windows 11 was seamless. Moreso with walled gardens like
| macOS.
|
| In the meantime you can't sneeze in the direction of a
| mainstream windows manager for Linux without it introducing
| radical changes, not to mention how all distros are heavily
| fragmented and sometimes even customized.
| orthoxerox wrote:
| And liability, as mentioned in the OP, is a big issue. When you
| find a bug in Oracle that kills your DBMS, you open a ticket
| and Oracle _has_ to provide a fix (or at least a workaround)
| based on the SLA.
|
| Postgres developers, as the license says, have NO OBLIGATIONS
| TO PROVIDE MAINTENANCE, SUPPORT, UPDATES, ENHANCEMENTS, OR
| MODIFICATIONS. This means you have to do one of three options:
| - hire Postgres experts into every ministry. Not very
| efficient. - create a single government agency that
| provides support to the rest of the government. Might easily
| lose efficiency, as any other bureaucracy - create a
| commercial support provider that has to earn money by selling
| Postgres support to private enterprises. Again, there's a risk
| that it will start charging the highest possible price for its
| services.
| szszrk wrote:
| > you open a ticket and Oracle has to provide a fix (or at
| least a workaround) based on the SLA.
|
| Have you received reasonable help in reasonable time that
| way? How big was the investment on your company's side to
| make that happen?
|
| It was a meme on every DBA team I worked with.
| orthoxerox wrote:
| Yes, we have received reasonable and timely help when a
| wild ORA-600 appeared (with an Oracle engineer arriving on
| site to diagnose and apply the fix), but you are right, we
| had an 80-core POWER machine running this database.
| zdragnar wrote:
| The reality matters far less than the vaguely worded
| promises CEOs think they hear when they're sold on
| switching to Oracle.
| ripe wrote:
| "Oracle has to provide a fix" also means that you can tell
| your boss that you're doing your best and it's up to Oracle
| now.
|
| It's not just about fixing the problem, but about
| protecting your own career. "No one ever got fired for
| buying IBM".
| szszrk wrote:
| That's an obvious, typical mechanism. A sad one.
|
| Now circle back to the main thread - you invest some
| multi-million budget yearly to have support, but you get
| just an excuse.
|
| People are expensive, but not "oracle expensive". Plus
| there are many smaller shops that sell support for
| opensource databases, I'd you don't want to hire senior
| people.
| kergonath wrote:
| > as any other bureaucracy
|
| It is not bureaucracy vs magical efficiency. There is the
| same issue in any large organisation, even corporations. In
| practice I don't think it would be as bad as you suggest.
| Having an agency focused on providing support instead of
| sending money to shareholders also limits other kinds of
| inefficiencies.
|
| > Again, there's a risk that it will start charging the
| highest possible price for its services.
|
| That is exactly the situation we're in, where governments are
| tied and dependent on single providers (be it Microsoft,
| Oracle, SAP, or others). This solution would create
| competition opportunities by opening a market, it does not
| need to be a monopoly.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| You missed one: hire one of the many existing providers of
| Postgres support services. Postgres have a big list of these
| providers. [0]
|
| I can't comment on how well they perform in practice compared
| to the conventional monopolised support model that closed-
| source software tends to offer - perhaps better, perhaps
| worse - but at least in principle, the solution is there.
|
| [0] https://www.postgresql.org/support/professional_support/
| kristofferg wrote:
| " create a single government agency that provides support to
| the rest of the government. Might easily lose efficiency, as
| any other bureaucracy". As opposed to huge corporations that
| are known to be the pinnacle of efficiency...
| crote wrote:
| > Again, there's a risk that it will start charging the
| highest possible price for its services.
|
| So you switch to a different commercial service provider,
| problem solved. The software is open source, they can't lock
| you down in a predatory contract. Worst-case scenario, you
| can always choose to fork it yourself.
| hyperman1 wrote:
| I actually managed to get Oracle to fix a bug once. This in
| quite a big organization, with a huge amount of money going
| to oracle. I could explain them exactly what was wrong, how
| to fix it, and still they denied the very existence of the
| bug (and cited the expensive half-working workaround other
| companies used at the same time). Then they ignored what I
| told them and fixed it in a way that did not fix it. Then
| they fixed it, and did not allow us to use the fix until it
| was officialized in a real service pack.
|
| The whole process took multiple months, reading all contracts
| I couldget my hands on, answering the phone at 3AM, a lot of
| patience, and treating Oracle as a student who was 2 weeks
| late with their homework. After that, all oraclies at the
| organization were completely awed because I was the first
| person ever who managed to get a usefull new patch out of
| oracle's service.
|
| If you want results, get Postgres. If you want someone to
| blame, get Oracle.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| > If you want results, get Postgres. If you want someone to
| blame, get Oracle.
|
| It's the someone to blame part that's important in big
| corporate bureaucracy. It's being able to tell your boss
| "We've done everything we can, it's in Oracle's hands now"
| limits your own liability vs. "We need to fix this
| ourselves, and haven't solved the problem yet."
| grg0 wrote:
| Yeah, the difference between being a child and being a
| man.
| forinti wrote:
| > If you want results, get Postgres. If you want someone to
| blame, get Oracle.
|
| I've twice offered fixes to Oracle (didn't even get a thank
| you); countless times I've had to find workarounds; and
| I've lost endless hours working with support to get things
| fixed.
|
| I have no respect for Oracle software. It gives me nothing
| but headaches. I can't really just blame Oracle, because I
| have to keep my organisation working. I just wish I could
| get rid of it.
| croes wrote:
| And then MS makes changed like the ribbons for MA Office and
| you start training again.
|
| Most people don't know much about the OS or Office, so you have
| to train them anyway for the companies use cases and non
| standard programs.
|
| MS just seems convenient, but isn't. In large companies every
| update brings problems.
|
| Things like Teams change the UI quite often which leads to
| support questions.
|
| So for me the training costs don't differ that much.
| nyclounge wrote:
| It is much more economical to invest in local open source
| people to take care of the tech need than big corp. Big corp
| are notorious unreliable over long period of time, their
| incentives are NOT aligned with the customers, only with
| profit and/or 3 letter agencies.
| sanex wrote:
| I still hate the new ribbon.
| cjfd wrote:
| "corruption is a red herring, corrupt officials and companies
| can be corrupt regardless of software license."
|
| Corruption implies that somebody is making enough money to pay
| bribes. Therefore, corruption will naturally be to the
| advantage of those that make the most money from the least
| quality offering.
| bruce511 wrote:
| Not really. The company's not really paying bribes out of
| their own money though. They're paying it out of the revenue
| flow from that sale.
|
| In other words "give me this govt contract and I'll route n%
| of it back to you". n% has to be "reasonable" or there's no
| commercial point in offering the bribe to begin with.
|
| If there's a cash-flow issue (you gotta pay the bribe
| _before_ getting the contract) then I guess it favors deep
| pockets.
| Lutger wrote:
| Training is another cash cow from big tech, on many levels. It
| is a bonus for resellers and partners, binding the ecosystem
| together. And the maze of certifications that expire every
| other year or so makes big tech corps even more money, and has
| everybody invested. It is also a useful sales tool, because
| they don't cost much and can be thrown in as a discount. You
| can also achieve a kind of vendor lock in on the career skills
| more easily with certifications. Legions of Microsoft
| technicians are pretty much stuck in the ecosystem, because if
| they switch their certs and experience don't mean anything
| anymore. Not everybody has the technical chops to switch
| ecosystem every year. Even more pressure to not move to open
| source (or another vendor).
|
| If you think Microsoft makes it sales because its buyers are
| putting the right product in the right place, then you haven't
| seen a lot of Microsoft sales. This is absolutely not how it
| works. And it doesn't have a lot to do with corruption either.
|
| The people making the decision to buy an IT product are often
| not its users, and often not that much concerned with making
| the best short/mid/long term deal in the interest of the
| business. They are very much concerned in making the best deal
| for their own careers, and as these are the people who buy the
| thing some companies have competently specialized in optimizing
| sales given that fact. Oracle has a reputation for this, and
| Microsoft as well, but all big tech does it (just some do it
| better than others). Of course, there's some nuance, you can't
| get away with it if your product doesn't work.
| hyperman1 wrote:
| For a lot of software in megacorps, it makes more sense if
| you look at 'trained in X' as a kind of magic spell that has
| no real relation with the ability to do a job.
|
| If the end user says: I have no training in X, that mostly
| means they don't want to work with X or don't want to accept
| extra workload related to X. The company then provides
| training in X, another magic spell meaning money was spent so
| the company officially did something, and the excuse about
| not being trained won't work anymore. Blame has now been
| shifted from the company to the worker or even the end user.
| So training being expensive has better optics.
|
| Big tools like MSOffice have the ability to be put in hiring
| contracts: Everyone is assumed to know how to use it, so the
| company is allowed to deny the no training excuse without
| spending money.
|
| Actual training for the whole company is more like a
| networking event, and if you ignore the trainer and read the
| manual or watch some youtube, you may actually learn what
| you're supposed to. Once in a while, you get a trainer who
| knows what they are talking about. But all that is secondary.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| > If the end user says: I have no training in X, that
| mostly means they don't want to work with X or don't want
| to accept extra workload related to X.
|
| This has largely been my experience working in IT as well.
| I think folks in the tech world take for granted how
| "normal" continuous learning is for us, and how undesirable
| it is for others in the workplace. Your average office
| drone very much does not want to learn something new. They
| want to use what they always have, and keep the same
| workload.
|
| Even just attempting a switch from Windows to macOS, when
| their workflow is almost entirely a web browser, damn near
| caused a full on worker revolt at one organization I worked
| at. Training didn't fix it, because the desire to learn
| wasn't there in the first place.
|
| That's the kind of inertia that needs to be overcome for
| something like open source adoption at the end-user level.
| It's comparatively simple for the back-end to transition,
| but without an already willing user-base, the front-end
| average office worker is not going to achieve the same
| level of productivity for a really long time.
| tsss wrote:
| I don't want to learn something new either but you have
| no choice if you want to stay employed.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > Big tools like MSOffice have the ability to be put in
| hiring contracts: Everyone is assumed to know how to use
| it, so the company is allowed to deny the no training
| excuse without spending money.
|
| I would claim that if you haven't worked in the finance or
| insurance industry (or some related industry) for quite
| some time, you very likely don't know how to use Excel (I
| have a feeling that a similar points holds for Word and
| Powerpoint with respect to some industries, but I think for
| these applications this phenomenon is a little bit less
| pronounced).
|
| Indeed, I'd claim that most books about how to use Excel
| are simply crap. To just give you a glimpse how to use
| Excel, here some internet classic on this topic:
| You Suck at Excel - Joel Spolsky
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxBg4sMusIg
|
| Really understanding Excel is life task, similar to really
| understanding modern C++.
| huijzer wrote:
| I found this part interesting:
|
| > Gonzalez 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 wrote:
| 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.
| zabzonk wrote:
| Do you think that calling people "normies" is at all useful?
| pjmlp wrote:
| It is to me.
| rikafurude21 wrote:
| normie is just online slang for normal people
| cheschire wrote:
| You're right let's call them muggles, which has the added
| double-elitism of "I understood that reference" as well as
| the in-story elitism of the wizards. /s
| HPsquared wrote:
| Being called normal is hardly a slur.
| cbmask wrote:
| The government could order Linux ready hardware in bulk.
| Also, 30 years ago, normies were able to handle DOS, which is
| perfectly sufficient for bureaucratic applications. They'd be
| able to do so after two weeks of training even nowadays.
| motorest wrote:
| > Also, 30 years ago, normies were able to handle DOS (...)
|
| "Normies" from the 80s do not represent the dissemination
| of personal computing we experienced in the last 10-15
| years. So far we have one or two generations whose
| experience with personal computing is limited to
| downloading apps from app stores and ,at best, check
| webpages. That is very far from what people used DOS for.
| redeeman wrote:
| unless you're saying they are significantly stupider,
| they can learn
| WorldPeas wrote:
| While my DMV and TSA use some kind of green on black
| terminal system, I think this is still kind of optimistic
| for work more complex than sequential entry. Maybe
| something like q4os could be employed for a stable GUI.
| From what I've seen in government work, groupware and chat
| systems are a definite force multiplier over a locked dumb
| terminal
| zzzeek wrote:
| people who used computers in the 80's/early 90's were not
| "normies" at all
| vollbrecht wrote:
| There was an interesting story with the LiMux[1] ( Linux &
| Munich) project. The local government in Munich used it for
| quite some time. But than Microsoft came and installed there
| German Headquarters in Munich. With that new headquarter and
| enough lobbying, LiMux was forced out by the then new
| government just the moment it got "successful".
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux
| mschuster91 wrote:
| LiMux always gets mentioned in such topics... it's an
| interesting story and as I've actually worked there early in
| my career I've written a few times about what the actual
| issues were and why it failed - you might read through [1].
|
| tl;dr: LiMux didn't just fail due to politics (although
| politics _did_ play a large role and I will forever dislike
| Dieter Reiter for a multitude of reasons, LiMux being among
| them), it was set up for failure from the beginning, mostly
| budget related.
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.
| ..
| calewis wrote:
| I worked for a very old school manufacturing company based in
| Switzerland. We wanted to roll our own IoT platform for sensors
| in the factory. We spoke to MS, what they had was a load of
| garbage, so we decided to carry on as we were. I later found
| out that the MS CEO called the CEO of this company and from
| then on we were fighting every day as to why we weren't using
| MS. This was a private company, not even a big spend, yet they
| got the CEO involved on sales calls? That's when I realised how
| corrupt it was an org.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| > We spoke to MS,
|
| They are out to lock you in to ensure sustained cashflow, not
| solve your problem in the most impartial and cost efficient
| way for you.
| speed_spread wrote:
| Small companies matter because the transition to non
| proprietary tech is potentially simpler and thus more likely
| to succeed. Add a few success stories from small players in
| the same market, making them more competitive might raise the
| attention of bigger players.
| sitkack wrote:
| This is absolutely the reason. This is why startups exist,
| new things are easier in small orgs for a variety of
| reasons.
| WillAdams wrote:
| Classic example of this was when Dell use WebObjects for
| their shop-front --- Microsoft was so put out that they
| threatened their licensing deals.
| dguest wrote:
| CERN (also in CH) made a half-effort to switch away from MS a
| few years ago. MS had started charging them a crazy amount of
| money. They got a few people working on it and even switched
| a few of the back end services. And actually the open source
| stuff worked amazingly well!
|
| Then like a year later they doubled down on MS products
| (right after a new IT head came in). The IT people I spoke to
| had no idea why this happened but no one seemed to think
| going back to MS was a good idea.
|
| Discussed more here
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41717607
| anthk wrote:
| They even published Scientific Linux, a CentOS like RHEL
| fork.
| dguest wrote:
| The CERN experiments and CERN IT have contributed quite a
| lot to open source. Part of this is necessity: when your
| experiment draws thousands of collaborators from hundreds
| of institutions and dozens of different funding agencies
| it's really difficult to deal with licensing fees.
|
| Scientific Linux is discontinued, though. A few
| experiments went to CentOS and (when that was moved to
| CentOS Stream) to AlmaLinux. But practically speaking the
| OS the experiments are using is a RHEL-like base with
| almost everything important overwritten via
| LD_LIBRARY_PATH, PATH, etc. and pointing to a fuse-
| mounted file system called cvmfs
|
| https://github.com/cvmfs/cvmfs
|
| For better or worse this allows O(weekly) releases that
| change what would normally be core components of the OS.
|
| It's kind of weird how all the interesting stuff at CERN
| is linux and open source, and then all the IT
| infrastructure is outdated MS services and Windows.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| When I was involved in high-energy physics (doing some
| pretty pedestrian software stuff), CERN switched from its
| beloved Hypernews system to something based on MS
| Sharepoint. Everybody was baffled about why they would do
| that and hated the new system.
|
| It seems like Hypernews was only turned off in 2021, much
| much later than planned, but they did do it.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Most of these companies are absolutely total bullies. They'll
| go to your board, CEO, governor, senator, mayor, audit firm,
| wherever. Punish your friends and elevate your enemies.
|
| A big part of being a CIO or CTO is having and maintaining
| relationships with key suppliers. This is especially true with
| SaaS/IaaS, where your business is valued based on whatever
| bullshit churn metrics the company cooked up. Your $2M deal may
| have way bigger impact on a Sales VP bonus than you think. You
| have to be a different kind of asshole to maintain control of
| these guys than in the old software world.
| looofooo0 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/archive/rja14/tcpa-faq.html
|
| Quote from here and the idea is from this https://www.researc
| hgate.net/publication/200167344_Informati...
| masfuerte wrote:
| This is tangential, but seeing a Ross Anderson article
| reminded me...
|
| Does anyone know if <https://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/>
| is permanently gone or just temporarily down?
| looofooo0 wrote:
| He died last year, so it is gone I guess.
| ajb wrote:
| He did, but the light blue touchpaper website is still up
| for me. It is the collective blog of the security group
| at Cambridge university, so I would guess likely to
| continue.
| caycep wrote:
| I live near the Pasadena/LA area and wish I had heard of SCALE22x
| earlier!
| raffraffraff wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| specialist wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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, Gonzalez 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 wrote:
| 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.
| grg0 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
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