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Government Code Collaborative Falls Short
Tom Adelstein writes "This story starts off singing the praises of the Government Open Code Collaborative, then reminds the reader: you discover that it has built one more bureaucracy to oversee its existing bureaucracy, with oversight over the new bureaucracy. Have you ever heard the cliche about prisoners running the asylum? Well, this gated and restrictive open-source government repository fits."
... go to www.gocc.gov instead - they apparantly don't know how to set DNS servers at the government, and require a www. in front... :)
- Leon Mergen
http://www.solatis.com
No slashdotting here... The URL in the article is wrong, it should read http://www.gocc.gov (a Plone site BTW) instead of http://gocc.org.
Not really all that offtopic...
The 'software' I looked at had bits in the blurbs about "To be released Summer 2004" and "Available September 2004". Now, tell me if my clock is wrong, but aren't they like 3 months behind there?
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
Thank you.
Anyway, I work in a state run organization as an IT wonk.. and our teeth to tail ration is extremely high (i.e. we support a diverse range of systems and people on a skeleton crew).. and somehow everybody thinks that we're "bloated" or "inefficient". I'm in a two man shop.. I had previously worked for a major DOD contractor, and my cohort had worked for an extremely large private IT contractor. People do not realize how uselessly bloated these types of organizations can get.
In our case it's sort of like comparing Sally Struthers (them) to Calista Flockhart (us).
>The point is not to infuse bureaucracy into open source, it is to use open source in government.
Always a good idea, albeit not always possible...
I'm sorry, but your comment is not insightful. It might be "outsightful", as I can only suspect you never held a public position.
>The governnment does not need to do more iota more than this: make it's code open source; be receptive to using open source and accepting open source contributions.
What is "the government"? You talk as if it were a whole, a beast having will... it's not! I'm pro-Linux, some colleagues are pro-proprietary (that was fun-funny, huh?) I have friends who say OpenOffice.org will never work... without even trying!
> We the open source community get the fruits what we paid tax dollars to produce, and the government doesn't waste money on redundant proprietary code. Everybody wins. Adding bureaucracy to something that is clearly a partnership with the community is just dumb.
No, it's not. It's necessary. Don't know about the States, but in my country there are legal procedures which must be followed. Policies must be implemented, procedures must be enforced and resources allocated. Doing so in partnership with _any_ community is out of question, because such community is not part of the government and, as such, it cannot influence public funds allocation.
It sucks, but restrictive laws are necessary to avoid corruption. Too bad the good guys get drowned in bureaucracy in consequence...
this site
has some cool looking stuff available.
http://www.nas.nasa.gov/Research/Software/
But you have to jump through hoops to get it.
In fact, I think that there will always be a problem with "US government" and "open source" at the same time, specifically that the government doesnt want stuff it writes internally (or has written for it by a contractor and owns copyright for) released to people, organizations and countries on that list of "people, organizations and countries we dont like right now" that it has somewhere. (the one places like cuba & iran and people like bin laden are on) because those people, organizations or countries might use this unspecified code to do unspecified "bad things".
Its the same thinking as to why there are still encryption export regulations in the US right now.