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Government Code Collaborative Falls Short

Posted by michael on from the unclear-on-the-concept dept.

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."

5 of 76 comments (clear)

  1. This isn't really new by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I know of two other psuedo open repositories another section of our government already has. These have been up for a couple of years and both are under utilized.

  2. Idioms, idioms, idioms .... by halothane · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Have you ever heard the cliche about prisoners running the asylum?

    No, I did not. I thought it was the inmates running the asylum. Or may be I am mistaken and Ken Kesey was more accurate regarding conditions in American mental hospitals.

  3. What they need is a GForge site instead.... by tcopeland · · Score: 2, Interesting

    ...like DARPA does with Cougaar.

    Government sponsored open source is already here... good times!

    --
    The Army reading list
  4. Christopher Fowler's reply by jcomeau_ictx · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Just after the linuxjournal article is a reasonable response by Christopher Fowler, one of the participants. Basically he says that the GOCC is just a small part of open source use within government, that it's all volunteer, and that it has its own niche. Well, better see what he had to say, I'm probably mangling it beyond recognition. I get the picture that it's a positive but slow step in the right direction.

  5. Government and Sharing Software by superid · · Score: 4, Interesting
    I've worked at a govt lab for over 20 years. Well over half our products are software (sometimes the rest seems to be powerpoint presentations). When I was hired I made inqueries to several other software development groups about "where are our common libraries? Where is the FFT I should use? where is our standard MLE routine? Where should I put the code for the detection algorithm that I just wrote?" There was no answer then and there is still no answer today. We have over 3000 people and not only do we not share libraries it is virtually impossible to actually exchange source.

    When we hear rumors of someone elses code that might possibly be useful (and this happens infrequently, and unofficially via the grapevine) we have to make "official" requests through an unfortunately large hierarchy. We are usually met with "why do you want this? This was developeed with funds from program XYZ and you can't use it. This model has not been validated and we can't release it...."

    And this is internal to ONE organization! When we make similar requests to our external sister labs of equal size and bureaucratic depth the problem scales exponentially.

    It's very frustrating and I wish I could come up with a way to fix it.