I hope it helps, but it doesn't seem like a sure thing on the face of it. To the extent these big, expensive government projects are similar to smaller “dumb-customer” projects, I don’t think this will help.
Anything that requires working with a hard to work with organization is “expensive” in one way or another. You need to sell them the project, which could take months or years. You need to figure out what they need, which will be difficult and you’ll be wrong because no one knows, nevermind articulating it . You’ll be forced to take numerous long cuts to meet unnecessary requirements. There will be iterations, slow progress, long waits for client input, training…
The companies who succeed at this are the ones who are experts in this process. They sell well. They’re good at “managing the process” and winning when a project is 3 years overdue, over budget, the spec is on iteration 46, and no one can remember the original goal.
OTOH, if the government is developing software, why shouldn’t it be open source. At the least, its good transparency.
Yes, this is mostly about preventing taxpayer rip-off for trivial software. Similar fraud schemes are exploited in almost every infrastructure development project. The government would repave a road with 1/3 of the official budget and the rest would be shared among the officials and shady business owners.
The Bulgarian government is unable to undertake a surveillance project of any substantial scale simply because it lacks the technological expertise.
I do not think you can imagine what kind of money (huge amounts) and what kind of software (worse possible you can release) is developed in fraudulent schemes where corrupt governments meet corrupt businesses. Having them by law open spurce I believe it will stop a lot of money to be wasted and quality of software to be much better compared to what is happening now.
Anything that requires working with a hard to work with organization is “expensive” in one way or another. You need to sell them the project, which could take months or years. You need to figure out what they need, which will be difficult and you’ll be wrong because no one knows, nevermind articulating it . You’ll be forced to take numerous long cuts to meet unnecessary requirements. There will be iterations, slow progress, long waits for client input, training…
The companies who succeed at this are the ones who are experts in this process. They sell well. They’re good at “managing the process” and winning when a project is 3 years overdue, over budget, the spec is on iteration 46, and no one can remember the original goal.
OTOH, if the government is developing software, why shouldn’t it be open source. At the least, its good transparency.