I am not going to say that I agree or disagree with this methodology, but let me give you some context. Traditionally, getting into the GSA schedule is a lot of work and it takes a lot of time. So much indeed, that it doesn't make sense for most startups to do this.

For some startups in the Govtech space this makes more sense. It is a way to hack the procurement process. I would happily get one of our devs to put something together that uses our Open Source codebase and solves this "challenge" than to spend months navigating all the bureaucracy to get in the schedule.

Somewhere around $50b/year go through the GSA schedule (http://www.gsa.gov/portal/content/198473) so, IMHO, anything that makes this process easier is a step in the right direction against traditional vendor lock-in.