newspeak

Federal Agencies Embracing Use Of Open Source Software Code :: Defense Daily.

“With the right amount of effort, Montgomery said open source code can be a valuable tool, but he cautions that it must be included in an agency’s risk management decision. In certain cases, he said, proprietary software development remains the most effective option.”

Hm. From both experience trying to get (and quite often, after a while, succeeding) public sectors to adopt open source, and also seeing, as did the world, the appalling bellyflop of the Healthcare.gov, a big-software project, and then reading the explanations (of which there is no end), I tend to think the issue has a lot more to do with how contracts are imagined, drafted, tendered, awarded, supervised, and so on. And that in the US, the real problem is the one that actually has defined the nation but which is, inexplicably, seldom articulated: size. Yes, that was acknowledged by critics of the roll-out. But the vastness of the US, in geography but also population (and its actual diversity), is and always has been, a defining feature. The US is the 3rd largest country in the world, at least in terms of population. In terms of habitation, with urban densities on both coasts and also on both top and bottom continental boundaries, few polities can be said to be comparable, yes?

(BTW: And just as interesting as the article, are the jobs listed to the right, in the Job Center column.)