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Comment by da_chicken | Hacker News Reader

> If there's one thing the government is known for, it's writing bug-free, efficient software.

That's because they're usually required to accept the lowest reasonable bid. As someone who works in the public sector, trust me, we try to get the money to people we know will do a good job. We have to work with the shit we buy every day. We want it to be good. There's just a lot of people willing to put in maximum of effort on a bid and minimal effort on execution.

> Also, for real, this bug is not that bad. It's obviously a bug you'd rather not have. But no user data is lost.

I mean, kind of. I agree it's not as bad as the article implies. However, it's a pretty common pattern to download a zip file, extract and overwrite, and then throw out the zip file. It's not directly resulting in data loss, but a very common user pattern will result in data loss when you encounter this bug.

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> That's because they're usually required to accept the lowest reasonable bid.

Lots of public sector bodies use best-value rather than lowest-bid procurement.

Not in the EU if you have to buy something expensive with tax money. Because the Public Procurement directive says you

* are required to hold a public tender

* Before you start, you create a list of criteria, with a weight for each of them.

* 50% of the weight goes to price.

* Once the process starts, common sense is treated as being bribed.

Turns out it is very easy to be 50% cheaper than anybody else if you are not required to have a working product.

As someone who had to deal with them from both sides, EU public procurement laws are fucked up beyond repair. There is, however, a simple cure for software that the public sector is avoiding in most places:

1. base the software on an established, battle-tested open source product, there is one for almost any business case

2. use the money to hire an in-house team, hiring norms in public sector at least ALLOW for quality selection, unlike public procurement ones

3. develop in the open, invest into visibility, attract community members

4. shill, try to get as many agencies across your and other member states to pick the same solution and co-develop the software with you, this way the cost drops for everyone

Even if you can't find something to satisfy point 1., the other three points would still work to your benefit. If you can push this for long enough to make the software standard in more places, you could get a critical mass of outside developers to form consultancies you could hire later for additional work.

I know Munich is poster-boy of this not working for desktop OS-es but that's really a consequence of two things:

1. They made all the wrong choices (heavy customization, chasing windows look and feel, not tracking upstream progress)

2. They got elected officials who were effectively Microsoft shills (the top-down decision to go back to Windows was heavily pushed by a single executive who was pissed off he couldn't use Outlook he was used to on his previous drone job).

> 50% of the weight goes to price.

Turns out they often need to tender as fast as possible and just use "lowest price satisfying all other criteria" as a way of choice.

> Turns out it is very easy to be 50% cheaper than anybody else if you are not required to have a working product.

You are allowed to specify absolute requirements in addition to sorting criteria. For example, you can say, worth more than some price, "the contractor shall have at least n years of experience". As descendant says, these are used to work around ban of subjective selection. Sometimes, they overdo it, and no vendors qualify at all.

> You are allowed to specify absolute requirements in addition to sorting criteria. For example, you can say, worth more than some price, "the contractor shall have at least n years of experiene".

Exactly these are being used to pick a specific vendor. "Must have at least N people certified to do X for at least Y years", with "must have turnover of X for the last Y years" and few more, and you find out, that there is exactly one company qualifying.

There is no fast when talking abou tenders. You need to give at least 6 months by law to give companies a chance to respond. If they start asking basic questions, they get extra time to read each others answer. 9 months to 1 year seems a reasonable guess for a not to big tender

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