Hacker News Reader

Comment by newsclues | Hacker News Reader

It might be reasonable, if it was quality software. But it is crap.

Governments should unite to create basic open source software and then individual organizations can tailor it to their needs.

View on HN

The trick is the find some way that a vendor can monetize it. Sometimes you have management consulting groups building crappy unmaintained (except by them, if you extend the contract) OSS.

One thing that seems to work, sometimes, is having cloud vendor support. Could you support maintenance of an OSS platform that AWS (and/or their competitors) operates - that way AWS could "win" the contract, but the OSS system gets funded with a core team and various groups still contribute to make it better

I agree. Any tax payer money used for creating software should be required to be open source. Ideally, governments and similar organizations would utilize open source software, then use contractors to modify, support, and maintain it (again, releasing any changes as open source).

Contractors would then be responsible for providing excellent support, not some huge bloated product.

It is a partisan fight for the government to build and offer tax software. Huge uphill battle to build out infrastructure code projects.

Governments are controlled by rich people's interest. Of course they are lobbied to death to avoid any such kind of solution.

Bribery isn't control. It's just bribery.

Direct or indirect, it doesn't matter. It is a strong form of control.

Pretending it is impossible to get a semi-democratic government to work for the people instead of just very difficult is defeatism. In fact, getting people to believe "It's hopeless" is a big part of the way bad governments maintain control of people, like in Russia or in the USA

I'm not saying it is impossible, I'm only talking about the situation in the US. Currently it is dominated by the billionaire tech and financial oligarchs and we need to do something to change it. It doesn't make any good to sugarcoat this reality.

Governments aren't able to manage their way out of a wet paper bag unless it threatens their existence.

And yet 90% of all startups fail, which could also be seen as a indicating a certain level of incompetence in the private sector.

Consider perhaps that incompetence is distributed across the economy, and government and private industry share in that, with successful and unsuccessful projects as a consequence.

Governments can print themselves a bigger budget. Startups can't.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com