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Public Procurement and Open Source
Steve writes "Open code in public procurement is an interesting take on free software and open source software in a federal or state environment. Pawlo: 'It is time that public bodies and governments look over their public procurement policies. The policy should guarantee competition, not stifle it.' Thinking of the latest Bill Gates rant this make sense."
As somebody who works in procurment from time to time, I can say that open source work is'nt something that is too appealing.
Basically, it comes down to accountability. When the RFP responses come back, the government agency needs to see that there is a clearly defined orginization that it can access to resolve issues. If they see 'free' or 'open source', red flags will go up. "You mean anyone can change this? No thanks"
It's a standard way of thinking for government agencies. They will never adopt open source unless it first becomes general practice in the commerical sector.
The Internet is generally stupid
After doing some intensive research, we found a package that satisfied our current and future needs. Top of the line dual processors, maxed-out memory, dual RAID controllers, the fastest harddrives, etc, at quite a nice price
So we write up the paperwork and send it off to the procurement folks. About 9 weeks later (this is considered blindingly quick in the federal govt) The boxes finally arrive. Upon opening them, however, we discover these aren't the systems we requested. They had less memory, and more importantly, no RAID nor harddrives. We contact Procurement to let them know there has been an error. A week later, they call us back to inform us that there was *no error*. It turns out they took our request, and duplicating our effort, researched what was available. Taking it in their hands to decide what was best for us, they found and ordered these 'comparable systems'. Total savings: $39 per server.
Long story short, we had to purchase everything else we needed seperately. Your tax dollars at work...
The procurement system in the government has long been known to be broken. It's a system that was designed for the industrial age to acquire massive quantities of commodity goods. Applying this obsolete system in the 'Information Age' betrays its shortfalls:
- Beaureucratic documentation and approval processes that adds no value. What they succeed in is adding weeks and months (and sometimes years) to the procurement cycle.
- This system inherently favors large corporations over any other source. Instead of overhauling the process, the government tinkers with legislative band-aids such as small and minority business requirements
- By design, the people with the knowledge to make intelligent purchase decisions are not allowed to make the purchases!
The problem is that no one with any real influence has a true desire to fix it. While elected leaders decry waste and inefficiency, most of those wasted dollars is spent in someone's district. The beaureucracy doesn't want to change the system since it creates jobs which are a nightmare to eliminate. Lastly, the system creates a strong 'profit motive' for large business to work with the governent since inflated purchase prices go directly towards the bottomline.In the end it's just another means of creating pork, only much more difficult to see
Hi,
Peruvian Congressman Villanueva has proposed this law (in Spanish. Use the Fish) that will change the way Peru buys its software. The origin of the Law and it's "travel" within the Peruvian Congress is in this timetable
Congressman Villanueva's Law will ask for any software to be bought by the Government of Peru to provide data in open formats. It will also ask for the source code and the hability to modify the code, to adapt it to the necessities of the Peruvian Republic.
The idea behind this is (liberal translation from Spanish):
"We, the Governemnt, cannot allow any company -foreing or domestic- to ship software that can hide spyware. We, the Government, cannot allow a private company to own the data that belongs to the People of Peru. We, the Government, have special needs and obligations: provide the best 'bung for the buck', allow any Peruvian to audit the source code of our applications to make sure there's nothing hidden that endangers Peru, and to make sure that the data is available even if we change the software supplier. Any software that do not abides by this law will not be used by any Peruvian Government agency".
Also, check what Microsoft Peru had to say about it. And what Congressman Villanueva answered to them.
Go, Peru!