Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikekchar | Hacker News Reader

While I completely agree with you, there is a compelling argument for governments spending tax payer money on goods from local companies rather than competing with them. Of course, I don't think I would class MS as a "local company" for Munich ;-). I'm just saying that there are lots of reasonable points of view on this topic.

View on HN

Same governmemt can spend the same money within the same local economy by paying programmers. There is no valid reason and not that many "reasonable points of view" about paying a private company 5000 times over for the same piece of software, and still not owning it or being able to get full functionality out of it or being able to see into it or your taxpayers (who are subject to it's operation) being able to see into it, vs paying programmers to write the same thing 1 times over and then you DO own it and can get full functionality out of it and can see into it, and every town in your whole country can use it with no legal burden, no audits, no broken license mangers... And tomorrow, instead of paying for another 100 copies of the same license yet again, you can pay those programmers to make what you have even better or build the next new thing.

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.

how is hiring local developers as employees any different from outsourcing to a local company? if the city is developing software then it is surely something that doesn't already exist, and when they do they are also not selling it, so i see no competition there.

if the goal is to create jobs, then that also happens either way. i don't see the problem.

I'm working on some projects for the city of Amsterdam, by default all we develop is open source.

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.

In the UK we outsource to the cheapest provider. More bang for the buck but it doesn't seem very holistic and appears to encourage corruption.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com