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Comment by bluetomcat | Hacker News Reader

You wouldn't know the background motivating this decision unless you have been a frustrated user of the nearly non-functional software of Bulgarian state institutions.

Ludicrous amounts of money are paid by the government to a selected niche of companies for developing all kinds of useless websites which barely work under load and have abysmal implementations with blatant security holes. This law can act as a safeguard against such "epic failures", so that the taxpayers can be aware of what they are actually paying for. 300k euros for a static website? Let's hope it's over.

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I hope it helps, but it doesn't seem like a sure thing on the face of it. To the extent these big, expensive government projects are similar to smaller “dumb-customer” projects, I don’t think this will help.

Anything that requires working with a hard to work with organization is “expensive” in one way or another. You need to sell them the project, which could take months or years. You need to figure out what they need, which will be difficult and you’ll be wrong because no one knows, nevermind articulating it . You’ll be forced to take numerous long cuts to meet unnecessary requirements. There will be iterations, slow progress, long waits for client input, training…

The companies who succeed at this are the ones who are experts in this process. They sell well. They’re good at “managing the process” and winning when a project is 3 years overdue, over budget, the spec is on iteration 46, and no one can remember the original goal.

OTOH, if the government is developing software, why shouldn’t it be open source. At the least, its good transparency.

Yes, this is mostly about preventing taxpayer rip-off for trivial software. Similar fraud schemes are exploited in almost every infrastructure development project. The government would repave a road with 1/3 of the official budget and the rest would be shared among the officials and shady business owners.

The Bulgarian government is unable to undertake a surveillance project of any substantial scale simply because it lacks the technological expertise.

I do not think you can imagine what kind of money (huge amounts) and what kind of software (worse possible you can release) is developed in fraudulent schemes where corrupt governments meet corrupt businesses. Having them by law open spurce I believe it will stop a lot of money to be wasted and quality of software to be much better compared to what is happening now.

This is the same or even worse in Romania. I just sent to Romania prime minister a link to this article via his FB account. I am curious to see if I will get any kind of answer.

If you have a government sponsored monopoly like that, at least do a half-way decent job. I will never understand getting paid $300k for a static website and being so desperate to squeeze another ounce of profit out of an already absurdly profitable contract that you shoot yourself in the foot by not at least delivering something pretty.

I mean, wow.

The predetermined companies chosen to execute these projects have never operated in real market conditions and they employ underpaid, demotivated people. No competent programmer would ever want to work there. Most of these companies are actually ill-transformed former communist enterprises which started importing and selling hardware in the 1990s, doing the occasional state software project when it comes up.

What happens is they pocket $295k and spend $5k on an actual project. In Poland a company got ~$150k to make a system to collect and count votes for local elections, it failed spectacularly. It turned out they employed one 23 year old CS student to make everything over about a half year. No public salary data, but I bet they paid her something like $800/month. The saddest thing is she got most of the blame for failure, if you google her name it's the only thing that comes out.

You mean like the Obamacare website that cost nearly $2 Billion to develop?

By none other than CGI, HQ'd down the street from me in Montreal?

Governments and Big Corps have quite an ability to spend money :). Understand that it's a game of distribution of power - not outcomes, and you understand it a little bit better :).

Exceptionalism and efficiency is for small companies and startups, for the most part.

In all fairness to CGI and company, the government set them up for abject failure, no dream team of programmers could have succeeded with it taking the role of integrator for which is did not have the talent or realization of the testing required, so many delayed decisions, and last minute changes (like a very big one a week or two before), being forced to use an unfamiliar database that, worse, implemented an unfamiliar paradigm (wasn't an RDBMS), etc.

I wrote more details on this on HN at the time, ask and I'll dig some up.

I don't doubt that, but it's $2 Billion we're talking.

An 'unfamiliar database' does not begin to cover it.

Neither do 'last minute changes'.

It was a boondogle from the start, failure in gov, failure in planning etc., failure to understand what they are doing.

Google Engineers had to come in and fix it.

I'm sorry for my lack of clarity:

An unfamiliar database paradigm. If it was some random RDBMS there wouldn't have been a huge problem there.

You ignored the constantly late transmission of requirements, and I can't believe you're saying that a fundamental re-engineering of the way the site worked 2 or less weeks before launch should be trivialized. How are you even going to test that, when you don't really have the time to implement it well?

Considering the US is a powerhouse of software engineering, and this was a state project, why did they pay CGI a Canadian company to do this?

Because at the national scale, there are only a few outfits that could feasibly make the bid.

IBM, Accenture, a couple of others.

CGI is maybe the biggest 'go to' shop for this stuff. They have zillions of developers ready to go, and a deeply entrenched lobbyist/salesforce.

It's not as though the US Gov could just go to some little startup. Even though the probably should have - big governments and companies don't understand innovation and how these things work.

They see it like building 12 football stadiums - how could a small team do it? They need massive industries, tons of experts, lawyers, business analysts! :)

These things are hard.

How exactly is open source going to fix that? The same companies can write the same garbage code for too much money with open source software just as easily. In fact they're probably already using open source.

Their end code must now be open source. Taxpayers can review the code they produce and raise a stink.

So again I ask: how does that fix anything? The government still spent too much money. The site still sucks.

People are already raising a stink they're spending too much money for subpar work, and nothing has changed. Having the code has exactly 0 effect on either of those two issues. Even if a concerned citizen FIXED the code, the odds of the politicians refusing to accept the fixes "for the security of their infrastructure" is upwards of 5-9s. Why on earth would they take those fixes when they're beholden to the people they're already overpaying for the work who likely donate large sums of money to their political campaigns?

I can take my best shot here. This is how I would see it at least:

These politicians probably know nothing about the software they are receiving. 300k for a static site? Good deal! By making the sites open source, it allows groups that wouldn't be reviewing the code / bids to do so and then validate the work.

For a US example, the TSA has that iPad application which is essentially a pRNG. Or is it? There is speculation that it might be much more than that, but no one can know without seeing the source code. If we could see the source code, we would know for sure and could verify if this project was really worth hundreds of thousands of tax-payer dollars.

It would prevent vendor lock-in. Some time ago, before government officials become more aware of IT matters, it was common practice in government contracts in Poland that consulting company creating website or bespoke IT system would keep code copyrights for themselves and then charge huge amount of money for even simplest change requests. That ended once they start requiring that source code is delivered together with binaries. Open-sourcing apps is just one small step further in the same direction.

> 300k euros for a static website? Let's hope it's over.

That is actually not that bad considering the fact that to sell to the government usually requires going through a lengthy bureaucratic process that involves metric tons of meetings, paperwork, constant back-and-forth, changes and revisions, guarantees, insurance, etc, that costs the seller easily north of 100k+ just to get started.

Meaning the cost is not in the product nor service, it is rather in the process.

I hope our country gets to your level. Our online tax system is an excel sheet and the site doesn't handle load well.

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