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> Certainly the people buying software know best what their requirements are.

I doubt it. The people who are going to use the software are the ones who know what the requirements are. The people buying it should be asking the users, but rarely do.

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For a large software deployment, you should be getting part of your requirements from discussions with users, but there will often be a lot of requirements from non-user stakeholders. For government deployments, even more so.

Have you ever actually worked in a large org or government IT department? :D

Commendable ideas, but they do not translate to reality. Even taking the OSS discussion out of the equation: Understanding and integrating user requirements in development processes is a hard problem in general. It gets worse when we are talking about resource-constrained contexts (like government IT)

I didn’t say it wasn’t hard. Regardless it is extremely routine for multiple stakeholders groups to be involved in software purchases, at least over my 20 years of experience.

Ideally yes, but do you realistically think that happens?

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