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Comment by reillyse | Hacker News Reader

Large consulting companies like Accenture have entire divisions of their business devoted to "government". These divisions make money by developing software for governments. It is very much against their interest for this software to be open source because 1) there is visibility into their performance and 2) they can't sell very similar software to the same government if everyone knows what software they've already built.

These are the real vested interests preventing this code becoming open source and why lots of government agencies who do their own development are perfectly happy to release the code or access to their APIs.

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> These are the real vested interests preventing this code becoming open source

Absolutely.

They are not going to do this by asking them nicely. That is why it must become the law. Software developed for public money must be released under a recognised open source licence.

The reason you pointed out why this won't gain traction is why it needs to gain traction.

It's not the case for all consultancies though. The company I work for (much smaller than Accenture) does solely government contracting work and the majority of that code is open source. Every project I have personally been involved with for example has been open source.

One reason why government software development is separated from contract development work for private sector clients is that private sector clients understand that they own the results and can disclose that code if they want to. They are relying on bamboozling government clients. All the more reason for struct laws about disclosure of software developed for governments.

You just told me more about what Accenture does than I got from poking around their content-free website when a HR person from there reached out to me unprompted. At the, I figured that if they claim to be in seemingly every industry, but can't articulate what they do, it wasn't worth replying.

A few years ago, I did a consulting for an IT agency and had insight into their code, including some projects done for the government. It was a worst mess of spaghetti code I've ever seen. For one of those projects they've hired people without any or little experience for cheap, and sold them as seniors for a crazy price.

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