The Government's $200,000 Useless Android Application
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I installed the app. It works fine. Responsive, fast, no problems. I have two minor quibbles with the design, but they are minor. Does what it says on the box. Not an exciting piece of software, but... Has even one person commenting on this thread installed it except me? No? Didn't think so. "It's a piece of crap" says a highly self-interested blogger, and Hacker News jumps on that like starving dogs on Alpo.
You didn't? Why do you think we need to make the switch to IPV6?
And there is probably a lot of other stuff involved that I don't know about. And lets not forget some overhead to pay for the office and some profit.
It probably ends up being a few hundred man hours once you account for everything.
So yeah - it could most likely be cheaper or better, but the pitchfork attitude is probably going too far.
I couldn't help but note that the title contains Useless Android Application, although the article indicates that the total cost of $200,000 was spent on Android, iPhone and BB (not completed) versions.
I won't go as far as calling it linkbait, but if I ever wrote an article about an app I didn't like and it was available on Android, I now know a way to get more traffic if I were to submit to HN.
I'm having a hard time feeling outraged over the extra 0.06 cents this is going to cost me and every other American. It's all 'fail early, fail often' here on HN until the government does so, then failure and experimentation are considered intolerable inefficiencies.
This particular project seems like a bit of a miss, but even simple statistics can be enormously useful for some people: http://explore.data.gov/catalog/apps/
I don't _want_ my government to fail early and fail often. I don't _want_ them to experiment. I want stability, I want them to be on this side of the bleeding edge, I want them to be a generation behind.
When a startup takes this approach, the risk v reward is shared between the few people who sat down and decided that risk is worth taking. When the government does it, that risk is shared amongst the entire country, many of whom never wanted and could never benefit from the reward. Are government smartphone apps a useful idea? Why sure they are. I'd be willing to put my tax money towards the development of technologies that can improve my life. But I'd like them to be worth the money. Not sometimes, but _every_ time, or at least damn close to every time.
What I'd really rather see is the government investing in an open API for their tools and information and letting the private developers wrap around them, presenting the information in a way that is useful to a wider variety of people. The developers stand to make money from the $0.99 sale of the app, and the government gets to have the information available to the people who need to see it.
Right now my transit authority runs a halfway-decent website along with a freely accessible API. The website is functional, but not perfect. There is a thriving market for people who can present the same data in much more usable ways, for profit. This seems ideal.
What you're suggesting is that the government never engage itself in building frontends - and stick strictly to building data backends instead, and leaving all the gooey UI to private industry. In other words, people will no longer have free access to census data, bus schedules, budgets, or anything. Well, unless you're a geek who knows how to figure out the documentation to the API, craft some API calls, and parse the results into some human-readable form.
I can't think of a worse techno-dictatorial dystopia. The only people who gain freedom are the geeks, everyone else loses free access to their own government's data unless they cough up the cash.
I didn't really mean "that the government never engage itself in building frontends", I meant that the government, at this point, refrain from building smartphone apps. Until the app market is as standardized and established as the web, it will always be a waste of money to build apps for one platform, and a money sink to include them all.
Sorry for the miscommuication.
It's not as if publishing a smartphone app is exactly "bleeding edge" these days. Third party smartphone apps have existed for almost four years now.
My point is - I fail to see how this is an issue with the government trying to pursue "too much innovation". This could have just as easily happened with an overpriced website contract, but I doubt we'd be sitting around arguing whether or not governments should publish data on a website!
It's not the job of the government to innovate, it's the job of the government to function. I don't install Ubuntu 12.04 Alpha on my production servers, I install 10.10 LTS.
The source code (for iOS, at least) is also pretty clean and decently commented for what it is.
$96k is still outrageous, but for work-for-hire it's off by a factor of 2-5 rather than a factor of 10.
Nevertheless, it's crap. The quality of the constructed software is irrelevant because the feature set is a no-op. It's a graphical front end for a NOAA web service that returns temperature and humidity. If the public isn't living and breathing the content of that NOAA web service, maybe it's because there's no graphical tool to access it, but maybe it's because they have 50,000 other ways to determine temperature and humidity at their current location. Like, say, existing in a conscious state at their current location.
Most of us can say "it's cold" or "it's humid" -- but we rely on more mature data services so we can know exactly how cold or how humid it might be...
You've essentially just argued that NOAA stat tracking is pointless because "you can stick your head out of a window".
I've argued that the translation and re-display of these particular NOAA stats on a smartphone, for the viewer's location, is pointless because I can stick my head out of a window.
When operating an aircraft, I love NOAA stat tracking. I think NOAA and the National Weather Service are probably two of the best deals the American public can ever expect to get for their money.
I know with my work, when we're doing construction contracts with the municipal governments we charge at least double and we're the most expensive in the area to begin with (we have guys who've been employed for 20+ years, rather than guys who've been employed for the last 9 months). So I'd say it's probably on-target for a government contract.
> Like, say, existing in a conscious state at their current location.
Or perhaps the free app that comes as standard on an iPhone is why people aren't using the NOAA web service.
Although I know I prefer the Weather Office info here in Canada as it's more accurate and local than The Weather Network, which is paid for. It just doesn't have as many gimmicks, but then they don't whore you for adverts by being inaccurate enough to keep you checking back.
How do you know what code to write in those 6 hours? How did you even know there was an opportunity? What are the requirements? Is there a spec? How is the customer assured you are capable of delivering what they need? Does the customer even know what they need? Is what they _think_ they need even possible? How will you prove you've delivered what they asked for? Is there a need to user acceptance testing, and if so who's going to write the tests and who's going to do the testing? Are there any safety/copyright/legal implications about what the software displays? Who's ultimately responsible for those? Who need indemnifying or insurance to cover that? Is there any backend service required in addition to the mobile app? Who's building/maintaining/paying for that? Who's responsible for "fixing" the app if a 3rd party backend the app relies on changes or goes away? Does the customer require copyright ownership of the app source code? Are there 3rd party licenced libraries you're going to use that you don't have enough rights over to be able to give/sell the copyright to the customer? Who's going to spend the time figuring out and explaining to the customer exactly which bits of the source code they do and don't own? Are there any patent issues relating to the problem being solved? Are you _sure?_ Who's "on the hook" for patent infringement if something comes to light later? Who's doing the UI/UX/graphic design? How many iterations through the customers approval process will need to be done? What are the customers turnaround times on those approvals and who at the customer has the authority to ultimately sign off on things? What documentation is required? Who's writing that? What training is required? Who's doing that? What ongoing support is required? Who's doing that?
I think sometime developers fail to understand just how much _business_ stuff needs to happen before and after they write their code. It wouldn't surprise me at all to find that in the _best_ case, a project like this with "6 hours of development" also required 4 or 5 times as many hours to get the deal done. I could also very easily see the team stalled for a week or two waiting on approval/signoff, and if your 6 hours of development turns into two weeks where you (or a colleague) couldn't do other work 'cause you're chasing answers, decisions, or approval from the client - a factor of 10 between the "actual coding time" cost and the project cost starts to seem positively reasonable.
Or do you honestly think 6 hours worth of coding @ $100/hr is all a job like that requires?
Have you ever worked with a government department?
I am a professional Android developer. Something like this wouldn't take more than a day. It's a piece of cake.
What I suspect happened here is that the project was outsourced. These silly people tried to save money by hiring a foreigner to talk to another foreigner developer and get the app developed. To work on and a deliver a product these foreigners know nothing about.
A little while ago I had a little financial situation and was forced to take some cheap freelance projects. I was quickly picked up by a foreign recruiter and I took a couple of jobs really cheap. At the rate the Indian developers would charge.
I had to work on an app that was commissioned by CAT. The app was a paving calculator that was to be used by their employees.
This was seriously some of the worse source code I have ever seen.
I took my own personal time to rewrite the project. I also redid all the calculations and found various mistakes everywhere. I asked them to send me all the docs and had to redo everything from the ground up because these people were plain incompetent.
For about a couple weeks work I charged $300 dollars. I didn't care about the money, I just didn't want any of our road workers using a shitty and potentially dangerous application.
Correct results are absolutely critical in any non-trivial application. Acceptance of incorrect results just shows how low the quality grade is.
FYI, I'm looking at the source, and it's pretty basic. Nothing a high school student couldn't write.
It looks like the company that made this was: http://pixelbitcreative.com/ also: http://erg.com/
Lol, they don't even have a real site yet they specialize in Web Development. What a joke.
Bad developers exist everywhere.
To you, the American were foreigners which further enforces my point that working with foreigners in an issue.
I'm not saying that because I'm American my code is better. I'm saying that because I'm local and I care more I produce better quality.
BTW, in my story some of the most incompetent people were indeed American. The other developer did the best he could, and the recruiter too. The process was broken from the beginning. They wrote really bad documentation, and incorrect formulas. The source was bad, but it took much longer to get all the formulas properly documented and figured out.
There's no evidence to suggest that this application was off-shored, unless you've found something to the contrary. Quite clearly, the two companies you cite are located in Massachusetts and Virginia and both companies are staffed by developers in the US.
I suspected it was offshored because I smelled the rot, but looks like I was wrong. It was just the victim of the broken process.
That's what my rant is really about, not necessarily against foreigners. It's just that the process produces broken/poor software.
I'm not saying that it's true for every company, but it was true for CAT.
You should have contacted CAT directly and upsell them exposing their blatant mistake.
Also... the contracting process is similar to what he describes anyway, in fact it is better. For example [SBIR](http://www.sbir.gov/) (I hope hn uses markdown) are small business requests for R&D on everything from software to engineering. A small amount of $$ is given up front, and then more if the project becomes field testable, more if it becomes usable.
Even if you were to divvy that up evenly, it would make the implementation 10% of the cost.. about 10k.. which is pretty cheap on a "work for hire" basis of a software house for a software developer.
Now I look at this, it's actually quite cheap !!
You meant doubleplusungood, right?
But, as another person commented, the overhead around government projects (documentation, reports, meetings, etc) will bloat things beyond a simple time/materials development contract.
The FBO has a site listing the contacts, but there are actually some pretty interesting projects that pop up to be bid upon. Only downside for someone new to the process (or a small shop) is that the big boys (SAIC, etc) have this part pretty streamlined as well as sometimes having in's with the agency requesting the proposal.
Edit: The site -- https://www.fbo.gov/
So typically people will order the most expensive things that can fit within the budget or even buy stuff they don't need just to spend all the money.
This does strike me as often wasteful but I don't see an easy fix.
The Android app cost 106k btw. So looking at this guys hourly rate, it would take approximately 6 months of 40 hour weeks for him to cost that much to do the app.
So if he:
Learned out to submit the forms that got him into the bidding
Made changes to his company required to make it seem a valid bid target
Filed the correct forms to put in his bid
Factored in correctly the amount of oversight and travel that would be required to get even a simple app done according to the whims of the people hired to get it made
Used server technologies compliant with government desires, including ones he may never really willingly touch with a 10 foot pole
Then MAYBE, just MAYBE, he'd be able to go as low as say, 60k or so. And that's for a small indie dev. Now look at a bigger company doing this app (as the government likes support, unlike a single freelancer can necessarily provide), and you easily hit the 106k range.
Does it not work well? Sounds like it works like crap. But complicated crap still can be expensive to make.
BTW I looked at the code, and there's nothing that an average iOS (and probably Android) developer couldn't do in 4-6 hours.
Also, where is the code?
You can get it from MuckRock or from OSHA's own site. http://www.muckrock.com/foi/view/united-states-of-america/so...
They provided it 20 days ago, so no idea why the author mentioned that it wasn't available.
At best, it would cost someone a few weeks of time evaluating these bullshit submissions and realizing that they're a waste of time. At worst, they would be accepted, another $100k would be paid out, and we'd be worse off than when we began.
It's true that there would be overhead for running the competition and judging the entries, too.
Right, I was trying to raise the point that it's not always obvious where the line between "trivial app" and "major project" should be drawn.
In fact why not have contests about stuff that saves lives?
It sounded to me like the whole business was getting the contract written correctly. Once the contract was procured, fulfillment it was more of an after thought.
Sponsers care a hell of a lot that things do the right things when it's important.
1. Make something people want.
2. Bribe people in government to give you enough money to cover cost of said bribe, plus handsome profit, plus possibly actually making something, and then have the government force those people to pay through taxes.
I dare say that what you describe may even have been the original idea, but the facts of (2) are unarguable. Sometimes (for really big ticket items) the government official has to wait until they leave government to get the paycheck, but claim it they do.
If you jump through a series of hoops and bid low enough, you WILL get government contracts. They're just expensive hoops.
#1 on Hacker News is a feat, but this thing has legs on every political and general fluff channel - HuffPo, FoxNews, Conservative Radio, CNN, wire services, etc.
I learned from our own blogging efforts when you have a winner, take it to the bank.
EG - Hit every PR angle you can think of to get redistribution while you've got the momentum.
Any PR gurus out there that would comment on the top handful of ways to fan the flames on PR for a story like this?
I'd love to understand the process when you've got this ripe of content.
I remember when the IRS spent 4 Billion on a new computer system and had nothing to show for it. The joke I used for a week was "Hell, they could have paid me $2 Billion and still not had anything to show for it -- and saved half their money."
The problem those of us with lots of internal government experience is that most "normal" folks have literally no idea how much waste there is. Yes, it's like a big university. Yes, it's like BigCorp. But no, it's so far beyond those concepts that if that's the only frame of reference you have, you've missed it.
I love my country and love paying taxes for it to do useful things. But there simply is no system in place for shutting things down. It just keeps growing. In the private sector the measurement is "does it do something that folks will pay us for?" because if it doesn't, folks eventually stop paying, and the company goes away (although it might take decades). In the public sector the metric is "does it make a politician look bad?"
There's a reason Congress delegates all these powers to all these agencies. It's the same reason we have so many "Tsars". Nobody is directly accountable. It's all set up so that if there is a problem, some poor schmuck gets hauled before an investigative committee to get the riot act read to them. That way the guys who are supposed to be really responsible -- the Congressmen -- get to play the part of the person looking to fix things. Politics. It's a beautiful thing.
So at the end of the day I'm not really sure this is newsworthy. I could tell similar stories involving tens of millions of dollars, and I bet we could come up with a list of hundreds of these things. Anybody remember the FBI case file system? This is just way small peanuts. Perhaps the "Android app" part of it is enough to be newsworthy, but in my mind that's a benefit: today there are a lot of people pleading to move away from COBOL systems in some government agency -- and losing. I feel really sorry for those guys.
200k is a small amount (for any big org), and it's actually going to something public facing, unlike 90% of government work which is simply faceless men putting obtuse reports in each other's pigeon holes. Do we really want to attack one of the few times the government actually tries to make their work relevant to the public?
You could equally argue that the 1% is wasting billions on stupid sock puppet ads for online pet shops, photo sharing apps, and AOL. Or on stock options for chefs and masseuses. Or on million dollar teams that do nothing more than re-invent wheels, badly.
It's arguable that the government should be doing this at all. But I certainly believe that if government should be doing anything, they should be making their work available to the general public. I don't think they got screwed - 200k for an app is not a giant rip-off. They might have been able to do it cheaper, but it's not totally out of line with the sort of crap industry does.
This IS newsworthy. This shit should be the only news until it fucking stops. As you say: "But there simply is no system in place for shutting things down. It just keeps growing." until it collapses. These things don't end well. I say lets fix it.
Brought to you by the "doom sayer". Next!
Due to what they were asking for and the amount of time we thought it would take to accomplish it and provide the documentation they were asking for, we bid in at $60,000. We did not get the bid. I believe it was given to a university in Florida (damn grad students!) for a bid of $42,000.
In regards to the Android app in question, I think they just didn't have enough bidders. It's also possible they bogged them down in paperwork and status reports / updates (tends to happen with government contracts) which drove up the cost. I am a bit bothered that the bidding system does not favor companies based in the US that are not owned by foreign companies.
People who've never worked on government contracts cannot conceive of the reporting and documentation projects.
I've been on several (govt) projects where we spent as much time writing as doing.
Because they're the government, they often overspecify to not get taken advantage of.
Incidentally, that's why auctioning small pieces of a larger project independently is probably not a good idea. Costs could in fact skyrocket: each part would have its own contract, negotiation process, meetings, forms, etc.
Aanecdotally, a girl I know who works for a pharmaceutical company said they spent $60,000 on a three page web site.
Then I sit in Starbucks and listen to some freelancer get reamed for charging $1,000 to build and manage some guy's website. One would think that the price discrepancies for the same product among different buyers would not be so extreme in a capitalist marketplace.
The purchase and sale of cocaine occurs in a market where virtually all sellers are capitalists. It is neither free nor ideal.
In the big corporations defense, they don't use tax dollars.
Instead they use excess costs to reward us, their executives and us, their contractors.
The difference between big business and big government are sometimes difficult for me to see.
There's a fair bit of criticism levelled against the EU tendering processes, though. Many feel that the process emphasizes price at the expense of quality, resulting in a "race to the bottom" as another poster mentioned.
Public contracts currently open in the EU can be found on a website: http://ted.europa.eu
Looking quickly through the site, the contracts seem to have a huge range -- everything from large architectural projects to supplying a small Swedish town with photocopier paper...
You can also go here and see contracts already awarded (search for "iphone" for instance): http://www.usaspending.gov/
The US allows "no bid" or "sole source" contracts, which have several problems, not the least of which is rampant cronyism. Note that even the President failed to stop this gravy train: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/pr...
Also, you'd be surprised on how many hours get billed visiting the stakeholders for "face time" and to ensure follow-on work.
the implementation of EU government law by national governments is far from uniform and sometimes weak – in 2002, for instance, only 16% of governmental calls to tender were published – government procurement has been called "the weakest link in the common market".[2]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_procurement_in_the_E...
Also check the minimum amounts this applies to, this probably wouldn't have been necessary to put through the process anyway.
As the Wikipedia article states, these de minimis tresholds "provide an incentive for authorities to divide contracts into separate lots", which is thought to be the reason for the small amount of public contracts that go through the tendering process.
I think individual member governments are free to set stricter limits, though. At least in Finland, some public contracts as small as 15,000 € are required to be openly tendered. (Last year there was a well-published scandal when a high-level Helsinki city administrator ordered some 70k€ worth of office furniture without official tendering.)
My girlfriend works for the Health Department in my home state. They paid two consultants $100,000 to convert paper documents to digital form. The contract lasted one week.
The consultants literally put documents into a scanner and converted them to PDF. At the end of the week they took their money and left, leaving the bulk of the documents unscanned.
An intern could've done this work for $10 an hour. And he/she would've actually finished the job.
<code> - (float)getHeatIndex:(float)temp:(float)humidity {
NSLog(@"[getHeatIndex] temp: %f, humidity: %f", temp, humidity);
float hIndex =
-42.379 + 2.04901523 * temp
+ 10.14333127 * humidity
- 0.22475541 * temp * humidity
- 6.83783 * pow(10, -3) * temp * temp
- 5.481717 * pow(10, -2) * humidity * humidity
+ 1.22874 * pow(10, -3) * temp * temp * humidity
+ 8.5282 * pow(10, -4) * temp * humidity * humidity
- 1.99 * pow(10, -6) * temp * temp * humidity * humidity;
//hIndex = round(hIndex);
NSLog(@"-Heat Index: %f", hIndex);
return hIndex;This is especially true in the last 30 or 60 days - to the point where you invoice and are paid before the job is done just because it "has" to be in the billing period.
Government can hire technical people who can do the work in house, or who are qualified to evaluate the work. But because of the pressure to keep government small, qualified tech people go to the private sector and overcharge the government. Seems like one can't win here.
Its also worth pointing out that sometimes, just sometimes, it works out the other way. I was the lead on a team that took $150k in funding and produced an open-source implementation of some CDC specifications (https://github.com/talho/openphin), and became the first software in the country to be certified with it. We developed it in about 12 weeks, and the first milestone certifications were actually complete-able (meaning we had the features, though the paperwork took longer) within 2 weeks. We were up against companies used in other states like Northrup and SAIC that literally spent millions on the implementations (and don't even get me started on how much those same companies spent coming up with the standards in the first place, which is a whole 'nother problem) and beat them handily at their own game.
We did use private contractors as additional assets starting out and while they were more expensive than hiring additional developers, they had two great attributes: temporary, and good at what they did. Its worth it to pay for competence, every single time. And when its a one-time expense for a project, its much, much easier to deal with than something that incurs year-over-year expenditures.
The OSHA document is not rendering for me so I can't tell if there's a cost breakdown.
But that's government. Still want to move more things under their purview?
1) Dev gets contract, builds app 2) Person who was arbitrarily moved to dept. of mobile-app development reviews app, figures it's good because it works on a phone, forwards the results to his/her boss. 3) Repeat step 2 at a higher level 4) Done.
There is a more stringent audit trail, perhaps. But I doubt there's a committee of people who sat aorund a whiteboard and designed this puppy. I hope there wasn't, at least.
In the agency I work in, there are 9 IT systems that go to production twice in a year. For the entire year the total development time provided (when environments are open for programmers to develop) is about 2 months. Yet the govt is paying the developers and complete IT teams for the entire year.
It really is ridiculous. Big boys like BAH, SAIC, CSC, CACI etc. etc. are milking the system and taking advantage of incompetent and gullible govt employees.
And this is the 'obvious' case, in which it's easy to tell it's crap. What about those times when I'm relying on the experts at these agencies to find solutions to difficult problems without a clear indicator of success? I'm not anti-government by any stretch, but man. The legalese sounded so good: "critical, real-time hot weather information"...
Sure, I know that's BS, but what about when I'm not qualified to judge it (i.e. military decisions in Afghanistan based on intel that I'm not privy to).
For more info on budget cuts that could effect projects like the IT Dashboard, see: http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2011/11/16/crunch-time-in...
For information on the open source IT Dashboard project, see: http://civiccommons.org/2011/05/it-dashboard-six-weeks-in/
Another thing. It seems like the company outsourced the development as well to these guys pixelbitcreative. The entire application contains ~1400 lines of code. I wonder how the money got eaten as we went up the chart.
1. "The shocking part about this isn't even that it happened, but rather that it is incredibly routine. This is just one FOIA request to one tiny department for one tiny, single use application that will perhaps be used by, at most, five hundred people.. and it cost as much as a house. You can imagine what the waste must be like in other government run sectors..."
2. "The other issue is the source code. In my opinion, since we taxpayers paid for the development of this piece of shit, we should at least be able to modify and redistrubute the code. Apparently though, the Government doesn't have to supply any information which it considers to be a "trade secret," and OSHA has determined that this crappy source code is somehow a privileged secret. "
I wonder if the denial of showing source code was because they really DO think it is a trade secret. Or they are too embarrassed to show it?
You realize that these two sentences oppose each other, right?
A lot of cost can be added through management of non-technical aspects. The wording may have to go through rounds of approval, goals and features may shift, etc. The cost of writing endless detailed RFP's and the long sales cycles increase the cost.
That said, there are also a lot of "consultants" who really are just crap. It made me embarrassed to be in the same business and that is part of the reason I don't work for government clients anymore.
The Civic Commons marketplace is currently still in closed beta, but it will be opening up very soon. Please sign-up: http://marketplace.civiccommon...
1) $200K is for Android +iOS + BB apps
2) Source code is available
3) App works as advertised and does not Crash (installed)
4) Selling to big Gov. is expensive (not 10X but surely 2-3X)
5) The poster wildly underestimates the total project cost and puts in some arbitrary coding estimate
Linkbaity title + Misleading facts + Moral outrage at big Gov != HNews Frontpage
* we don't have any actual evidence to support the author's claim that this sort of bloat is routine (remember, plural of anecdote isn't data)
* we don't know what kind of wasted money gets tossed around in major corporations (assumptions about how corporations must be lean do not constitute actual evidence)
* we don't even have a way to find out what sort of bloat and waste takes place in corporate america - the government at least lets us find out
I often feel that I would happily fix them for free as a public service in a fairly short time period, but no doubt it takes months and lots of $ before they are addressed.
Then again, just look at this app. How could it get any worse? lol
The presence of a race to the bottom on functionality is independent of whether or not the contract is open. If they don't have anyone competent who is vetting the proposals or evaluating the progress and deliverables, then they will wind up with shit no matter how they arrange the contracting. But if it's open to normal software shops, then at least they probably won't wind up with $200,000 shit.
Cheap yet sufficient is the desired outcome in government work.
I'm guessing 'sufficient' was defined too broadly or too specifically, and therefore was not correctly tested for on delivery.
Then do it Scrum style.
I know there are bidding procedures for everything to fight corruption but for little projects like this they should come up with a procedure to use odesk or similar services.
The meat it feeds on; that cuckold lives in bliss
This is recurring theme that traces back at least as early as the 1990's.
What's different now is that there is historical evidence that open source projects can produce higher quality software than proprietary ones.
If you have evidence that open source can produce generally better quality software, or is consistently better for the same kinds of problem, I would like to see it presented.
Did you notice my choice to use the words "can produce" (as in "sometimes") not the word "produce" (as in "always")? I would never make the later statement: open projects always produce higher quality software than proprietary ones. That's not my belief.
As such, you are asking me in your last sentence if I have evidence to support a statement I would never make. Of course, the answer is no, because I would not bother to look for it.
But I would be interested to know why you would like to see such evidence if it exists? I could take a guess as to the reason(s) but I do not want to make assumptions.
I don't think you're claiming that open source software is always better.
I do think you're claiming that overall open source software is systematically better in some way than proprietary software, obviously not in every instance and subject to noise and variance. Feel free to correct me if you not making any such claim.
I'm asking for evidence because you stated catgorically that evidence exists but I have personally never come across it.
What is the evidence you referred to in your original comment?
As for evidence that open source projects can (sometimes) produce "high quality" software, TCP/IP is the first example that comes to mind.
Once upon a time, there was a government software project, a government contractor and a grad student...
Assuming the usual kernels, we're all using that code, or derivatives of it, right now.
By using the word 'higher' you clearly indicate that you think that there is a quality advantage to open source software.
If you don't think there's an advantage to open source development, then I don't see what meaning you were trying to convey in your original comment.
It seems bizarre that you don't know why I'd be interested in evidence that open source projects have systematically better quality. It would be a major result with implications in project planning, system architecture, organizational philosophy etc. To date, I have never seen such evidence - only reasoned opinion which is valuable but inconclusive.
If you had evidence, I'm sure you'd have produced it by now.
It's obvious (as I stated in my first reply) that open source can sometimes produce high quality software. Another great example would be webkit.
I thought you knew of some evidence that might show why governments should choose open source, other than opinion and dogma.
I'm disappointed that it doesn't exist because it would be powerfully persuasive in furthering the cause of open source.
Here's what I meant. I believe there were naysayers in the 1980's and early 1990's (and maybe they are still around today) who argued open source would never work. I believe history has proved them wrong.
As you pointed out, open source, like proprietary, can produce good results or bad results. It can produce "high quality"[1] results. It can even produce "higher quality" results.
I believe the reasons why open source is as good a choice as proprietary are very simple and quite obvious: If the user of the software can read the code, then 1. it is easier to evaluate the author's skill and programming sensibilities and 2. it is easier to fix errors and make improvements (without having to pester a proprietary software vendor).
You were also hoping that I would make an argument that the results obtained are somehow related to whether a project is open or closed. As I said, I won't make that argument. And as such I won't look for evidence to support it. That's because I do not believe it.
You have set yourself up for disappointment. I played no part in it.
If you want to know what I believe in terms of how "high quality" or "higher quality" software is achieved, just ask me and I will tell you[2].
But please do not make assumptions about what I think.
All the best.
1. Quality is a subjective determination.
2. I should warn you it is nothing revolutionary. I will only state the obvious.
Fair enough.
[edit - changed "produces" to "can produce"] - doesn't change my point.
You asked for the historical evidence I mentioned and I gave you the example of the TCP/IP stack we're all using.
I shouldn't have to say it but "open source" does not produce software, developers produce software. They might be working on a closed project or they might be working on an open one. The open/closed status of the project does not determine the quality of the software. The developers do.
You appear to be making the same mistake as the naysayers did when they said open source would never work. They believed the closed/open status of a project was somehow tied to quality. They were wrong. (Developers working on) open source projects can produce high quality software just as well as (developers working on) proprietary ones can. You cited the example of KDE's webkit to indicate you agreed.
If this is still somehow confusing to you, then I'm afraid I cannot help you.
Now you say: "The open/closed status of the project does not determine the quality of the software. The developers do."
So mentioning open source was irrelevant then?
Here goes.
What are the arguments _against_ open source?
What if someone says, "Open source means poor quality"?
You can look back on the last 15 years, choose some examples of open source software and rebut that with evidence.
I would make this rebuttal.
You apparently would as well.
Now, what are the arguments _for_ open source?
You could say "Open source produces high quality software." Note: Not "can produce" but "produces". As in always.
You could say that.
I wouldn't.
I wouldn't make that argument.
I would argue open source make sense because the source can be reviewed and corrected if necessary, without being dependent on a proprietary vendor.
Hope this is clear.
Given the extremely basic task at hand, as an end user my main concern is that it's fast (even over slow connections), reliable and simple. If it breaks I can fix it.
My preference would be to retrieve the numbers into a non-graphical console via a few keypunches. All I want is a couple of numbers and I'm done.
This could be done with a TCP client like netcat and a shell script that uses basic UNIX utilities. And I could teach an 11 year old how to do it.
If a "smart" phone OS does not allow something so simple by default, then to me it's not very useful. It's been dumbed down. "Smart" is the wrong word.
It didn't even stay in the American economy which should be a minimum requirement these days if a US solution is available.
I can't fathom a way that this could have anything to do with the government doing the one essential job it actually has to do! It's not just that it's a badly made app. I think the entire fact that the government making apps like this is absurd.
Given what the government actually is (the only agency with the legitimate, legal monopoly on the use of force), it is no wonder that it fails so miserably at doing stuff like this.
If you choose to work in a place, that's your choice. Even if you fail to make sure it's safe before you work there, or decide to work there despite the risk.
Anyway, even if OSHA were legitime, this app is not effective at achieving anything, even if executed well.
Yes, I realize most people won't agree with the statement.
My hope is that by providing it as food for thought, some people may thinking about it and decide that they agree, or may at least be more open to the idea when it comes up in some other context.
Isn't it intellectually dishonest for you to call someone intellectually dishonest, when you don't know all the relevant causal factors? (Answer: no, it's just a mistake.)
You are mistaken: http://www.amazon.com/Darwin-Economy-Liberty-Competition-Har...