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Totally agree. One of the thoughts that came to my mind is that a public project like this one sh(c)ould be open source right from the beginning. That would solve a lot of quality issues on one hand, and probably the pricing will also be better for the Government/taxpayers.

While I am pretty sure that most congressmen do not get it, but there are some very qualified and awesome technical people who work in the Government. Probably, someone has to have the balls and call it open source one fine day.

My opinion is that anything that the government funds should be open source. Patents that come from government funded research, software projects, electronic voting, should all be open source. If we, the people, paid for it, we should be able to have access to it.

> anything that the government funds should be open source.

Generalization to open source everything that the Government does, or taxpayers fund, might not be such a great idea. There are some projects which are supposed to be secret (Like a NSA that's focused only on anti-socials) because they give our Government an edge over others.

Probably a competent agency with an oversight to decide on open/closed aspect can help, but the subject needs much longer and detailed debate. IMO, healthcare, education, civil investigations are perfect examples where we can go completely open source. Or get disrupted the valley way.

To be fair, I'd imagine the technology running PRISM is really incredible... i'd love if they could open source any of that.

Open source would certainly help in terms of transparency and hopefully quality but bottom line is that it would not have saved this project. This project failed because of incompetent management.

Requirements came in so late that development didn't even start until March of this year, and requirements were changing right up until the week before launch. Only one week of full integration testing was performed.

While open source should be used in government IT, that's not the main problem in government IT. The main problems are poor project management, a lack of accountability, a broken contract award process, and decisions makers who don't understand IT well enough to guide these projects to fruition. Open source would not solve any of those problems.

> ... a broken contract award process, and decisions makers who don't understand IT.

Those two lines pretty much nail the issue at hand. Not only for IT but for other aspects of Governance as well.

Isn't that pretty much the same problem with military contracts? Non-technical people making requirements and changes during a project?

I'm not sure how to solve that problem but it's clearly an issue.

Big military projects have the additional problem of congressional interference. Congressmen regularly force military acquisitions that the military may not even want or need in order to funnel dollars to their home districts. So it might make more sense to build all of the components of something like the Joint Strike Fighter in the same state, but instead it's spread over something like 40 states to ensure the project's survival.

And for whatever reason, the military seems to have a very short memory when it comes to major weapon system procurement failures. "Hmm, the V-22 went over budget, killed a good number of people, has higher maintenance needs and operating costs than we anticipated because of the USMC's requirements. I know, why don't we tie the entire future of our combat airpower to the JSF and hamstring that project with the needs of the USMC..."

Long story short, the space constraints of operating from an amphibious carrier forced design compromises on the V-22 that significantly worsened that program. Now with the JSF, the same thing is happening with the VSTOL variant that the USMC wants.

Read up on the '60s Robert Strange McNamara TFX debacle if you want to understand a lot about the F-35/JSF now and likely in the future, minus it also trying to do air superiority (we learned that lesson, although we didn't procure enough F-22s). The Strategy of Technology by Pournelle et. al. is a great source: http://jerrypournelle.com/slowchange/Strat.html

I watched most of it yesterday. It was a fascinating post-mortem of a software project.

What I saw was a small minority of politicians that seemed to have a handle on some of the technological challenges at-hand. Some politicians used their time to score political points completely unrelated to the technology issues - basically "our party is good / your party is bad" idiocy. Some politicians read prepared smart-sounding questions which they wouldn't be able to rephrase in another-way if they were asked to. One politician asked for a copy of the server logs so that Congress could get to the bottom of what was going wrong. And none of the company representatives were willing to accept that they'd done much wrong - instead taking every opportunity to blame people or entities not in the room.

> One politician asked for a copy of the server logs so that Congress could get to the bottom of what was going wrong.

No need to worry, folks! Your government is on top of things.

I wonder, how many Congress idiots does it take to fix the caching policy on a web server?

> If anyone saw this briefing, it was mostly a lot of really technologically illiterate people asking pointed questions about a gigantic set of systems that can't easily be answered to technologically illiterate people.

This is, unfortunately, what every discussion among politicians regarding any sort of technology is.

for those who want to form their own opinion, the hearing can be viewed at: http://energycommerce.house.gov/hearing/ppaca-implementation...

I believe the part about end-to-end testing and HIPA were something that needed to be asked and was not answered in an acceptable manner. There are some technical folks on that committee and they even showed source code.

Is there a video link where we can watch it?

I can't seem to find it - may be a bit longer than they want to post. I'll dig around some more.

http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/ImplementationofH