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Comment by websiteapi | Hacker News Reader

It's strange that this software isn't actually provided by the government to begin with. Quickly checking eso.com, most of their use cases are governmental to begin with.

what I don't get is the government collectively would save money just making it themselves.

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Markets have essentially prevented this from being a reality. Government can't pay anything close to competitive with the private market, if they did it would be an easy target for "government waste", and even if they could, why take a job that could be axed during a budget cut? The people doing the firing could justify it by claiming an outside vendor would be cheaper anyway.

Governments are generally very bad at software, or any kind of highly technical project that the legislators really don't understand.

I know several people in tech who are volunteer firefighters. Why don't they form an open-source project? The software described in this article doesn't sound too complex; at a couple of points I was thinking "just use a spreadsheet."

looking at ESO's homepage their main pitch is around NERIS compliance (https://www.usfa.fema.gov/nfirs/neris/) so it looks like this is a case of regulatory capture forcing fire departments to buy new software. An obvious solution here is that any government mandated information system must come with an open source implementation that guarantees compliance.

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