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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."

6 of 76 comments (clear)

  1. Is it me, or... by Sein · · Score: 4, Funny

    did we just Slashdot a government site?

    1. Re:Is it me, or... by Eldav · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

  2. Getting it backwards by physicsphairy · · Score: 4, Insightful
    The point is not to infuse bureaucracy into open source, it is to use open source in government.

    The govenrnment 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.

    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.

    --
    When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
  3. Mccarthy nonsense by SubtleNuance · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?

    Everyone who works in a Fortune 1000 company, please raise your hand. Anyone who thinks that their employer COULDNT be any more bureauratic please raise their hand.

    Implying Governments are INHERENTLY bureaucratic is a myth, conversly, arguing that a PRIVATE firm (of any notable size) isnt just as complex is silly. The Short: All big systems are complex and byzantine. /raises hand.

  4. Good idea, bad implementation... by IO+ERROR · · Score: 4, Insightful
    ...which is typical of government. Or any large bureaucracy for that matter.

    The whole idea behind open source is "open," and that's the part GOCC lacks. Nobody can contribute to it without significant restrictions like accepting liability for the code. Open source has NO WARRANTY for a reason. You want a warranty or technical support, you buy it. In addition they have provided no way to build a community around their offerings.

    GOCC is virtually unchanged from when I looked at it six months ago, and I wouldn't be too surprised if everybody just kind of ignored it.

    --
    How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
  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.