Misleading headline, go read the RFP. It's a major multi-year project that includes 24/7 support (for years!). They are funneling in data from thousands of sources and trying to automate it. Plus have it searchable in a very public way. Hosted in multiple data centers. etc etc. To make it sound like they want a new template is simply incorrect.
Misleading article! ABC news is messed up if they think this is nearly enough info and it suggests that the government is wasting money. $18 mil is nothing, a single F-22 aircraft costs $361 mil and there's more than one of those being built/deployed...
Indeed, every report I've heard about this story has been misleading. "I know how to make websites, why don't they send me $18m?" Politics is so frustrating sometimes.
Fact is, there's a huge open source community that would do 90% of that work for free in order to get their names on a high profile project like that.
It only takes a few pages of reading the RFP to start seeing the rampant waste. They'll be purchasing Sybase, Oracle, and MS SQL Server for the project. Why all three? That's likely 100s of thousands of dollars right there.
Also, why are they contracting this out? Why not hire a small team, and release in stages via some agile project management techniques?
I doubt this is a big deal in the grand scheme of things however its the sort of thing that sort of reminds you that no matter who is in power, things run the same way in Washington.
> Fact is, there's a huge open source community that would do 90% of that work for free in order to get their names on a high profile project like that.
A naive and unworkable strategy at best.
As a major open source developer and project leader I've come believe that the majority of relevant open source works comes from a tiny, motivated, and highly skilled minority. And remember, OSS developers don't work for free because they want their name on some product or webpage. There are jobs for that, and they even pay.
You should have put in a bid then. Could have made some "easy" coin for a month's work. Only three of 59 approved vendors decided to bid which speaks for itself.
> It only takes a few pages of reading the RFP to start seeing the rampant waste. They'll be purchasing Sybase, Oracle, and MS SQL Server for the project. Why all three? That's likely 100s of thousands of dollars right there.
The actual text says that the government would prefer to leverage servers and licenses they already have and those include Sybase, Oracle, MySQL and MS SQL Server. Other databases are allowed to be proposed, but must be included in the cost (including support for the duration of the contract). The existing site uses MySQL so they are not opposed to open source.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/16515421/RAT-Board-Solicitation
The bulk of the development work has to be done very quickly too, which vastly complicates things.