How Local Governments Got Hooked on One Company's Janky Software
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Switzerland recently made open source mandatory for the public sector. Whether it is mandatory or not in any geography, its use ought to be something to strive for, not only to maximize reuse, but also to achieve a higher quality result in the process.
The result is that the product almost always ends up being some bespoke pile of scraps built to a years old list of requirements that only vaguely aligns to the original problem.
It's a market that requires extreme patience and a building full of lawyers, it's not something that many companies are interested in participating in directly and pretty much impossible for a open-source organization, not that they'd even want to.
[1] I've watched a company dream-up a non-existent solution just so they could sue the government for an "unfair" competition and be compensated. I almost wish the courts had forced the government go with the imaginary product just to watch the company collapse trying to deliver something they had no intention of and would not be able to actually provide.
The obvious solution here is for the town to give the open source software an initial try on their own, then include it in the requirements as a preexisting use. In any case, the bid and contract then is not for a new product but for integration instead.
Further to that there's nothing stopping a supplier from either claiming integration with another product is unfair and prejudices the competition or simply importing the data into their proprietary system and leaving the FOSS solution as some vestigial object hanging on the side.
I'm not joking when I say the system is absolutely beyond fucked with no obvious solutions. Most of it is so mundane and boring you won't ever here about it but ask any public service employee about their experiences in trying to get absolutely anything, from pens to planes to platforms the stories are all the same and many have tragic comedies of when the whole thing went wrong.
The contractor can claim what they want, but the legal case is strongly already in favor of the jurisdiction if something is already bootstrapped in-house using open source.
I think these platforms just have a ton of features slapped together that barely function and have no thought given to UX, but they check whatever boxes their sales team need.
My city uses a similar platform. The explosion of pickleball required a scheduling system. They were able to implement that system in a few days, although it sucks, it works.
> But adapting the software to the state’s unique regulatory needs proved challenging
A good example that's not taught in CompSci, generic software is an unsolved problem.
In a school environment we contracted someone to write room booking software (A while ago, don't need a list of current solutions)
That's crazy, in an environment that's extremely similar across the worlds schools and also overlaps with non-school environments.
The "unsolved problem" has a lot of elements, bureaucratic, entropy, the value of differences.
But one thing we always see in these $100 million case studies is the government workers won't have specced it properly, so blame will fall back.
The cost is surprising but accurate much as every noob could "write it in a weekend", the fact it doesn't work is tricky.