I bet tax and pension systems have the same basic requirements cross countries with some local specifics.
opensource system can create much needed transparency in government project and organization effort. In my home country the unemployment agency spent atrocious amount of money to create an unusable job-posting app; something private companies do for fraction of the cost. More surprisingly, they doubled down on it; instead of scrapping it when it wasn't delivering. My guess it that some nepotism/favoritism was at play, and if the project was at least open source it could've been examined by others.
Buying software has the benefit that the manufacturer carries the risk.
Imho, they should set standards, APIs, file formats etc to enable competition and keep vendor lock-in to a minimum.
Communal software isn't always custom-built, the majority is normal off-the-shelf stuff, just focused on that niche. My involvement is limited to a small city a few years ago, that may be different in a large city as Munich if they have lots of custom requirements they don't share with other cities.
the buyer can not shift the risk to the seller. how would that go? put out a tender for a completed solution and then wait until someone builds the software on their own risk, hoping to win the tender? that's like a designer competition, and those have been considered unfair.
If the cities built it themselves, they would not be able to choose who to buy from. And if their self-built software sucks, they've wasted money and have a shitty software. One that they may not be able to replace, because there's no longer a market for that kind of software. Public endeavors into building things (airports, train stations, rapid train lines etc) in the recent decades in Germany does not predict a bright future for these kinds of things.
of course software is created. but the risk a company takes in creating is irrelevant to the decision a government makes. that risk is from the past.
you said that the government can either choose to take a risk by developing their own, or offload that risk.
but that is not the decision it needs to make. when it takes an existing product it is not offloading that risk, because the risk that vendor took is independent of the risk of the government.
the situation should be rather like this: either a solution exists, then we use that solution with a small or no risk because the vendor already took that risk in the past. or the solution doesn't exist, then we don't have a choice but to custom develop with all the risks that that includes.
at no point is there an option to offload an existing risk.
the only way to offload an existing risk would be to say: we wait until vendors come up with solutions.
(it may be that i am getting hung up on little details here. i believe that we are actually mostly in agreement in how a government is handling custom development)
Happy to say that I am working on such a project. Heavy (and unnecessary NDA) so I cannot say in cleartext but it is in use in one Nordic country already, it is opensource and already I hear that the Dutch found it to be a good starting point and probably will be using it too.
Some more details, the company I work for is owned by one country but doesn't compete as much as cooperate - I am a consultant from another company. And we both use open source software and libraries and publish as open source most of what we create.
I hate it that I can't talk about it.
- capacity planning for renewables (hydro power)
- streamlining mass transit
- large scale collection and recycling of bottles
- search and rescue operations in the North Sea
- education
as for why the NDA, my best guess is because "they could". Someone should tell them they are losing out on some great publisity and goodwill.
Which is why I think the NDA (or my reading of it) is way too wide.
To add one other angle: what is cheaper, paying 5 million to a company in Redmond yp provide licenses for opersting systems and officd software, or 10 million to a number of local companies to set up and adapt a slightly less refined open source tool for the local needs? In one scenario the money leaves the local economy, in other the city might spend more money but the money stays local and is used to buy houses or sandwiches, pay handymen or bus tickets or taxes. Where is the long term cost/benefit/ratio higher?
if the goal is to create jobs, then that also happens either way. i don't see the problem.
But whether this is a legal issue is actually an open debate, in some specific cases companies could potentially sue Amsterdam for sharing solutions with other governments and thereby "competing" with the market. How a judge would rule is not clear. But this is something they are aware of and it's a risk. It seems to also be connected to the way the project is shared.
As far as I know they are looking into changing the law on the national level so this stops being a problem. Also strangely enough, I've been told, as soon as the project gets funded by the EU, this law is not applicable anymore.
Open source means published on github, not many projects are actually properly documented.
There is no valid reason to just pay rent to anyone for nothing, even if they are a local company. That's not a good enough reason.