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Comment by GVIrish | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> ... 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

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