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Source Code Dispute in Boston's Big Dig
JoshuaDFranklin writes "Boston's 'Big Dig' is famously long-running and over budget as noted before on Slashdot. But now Computerworld is reporting that a Software Ownership Battle Adds $10M to Cost of 'Big Dig'. The legal dispute was over whether Massachusetts had the right to share Transdyn source code with Honeywell, causing $2.72 million in damages and $7.2 million in costs of a four-month delay in the project."
They just didn't actually buy the software, just waved some money at somebody who let them use it.
The state argued that Dynac had been modified as part of the project and had thus become a customized piece of software not subject to the legal safeguards for off-the-shelf applications.
Bt of a dodgy arguement though...
... anyone care to fill us in on what the big dig is?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Into the politicians pockets of course! Just to make things look "neat".
Ask a silly question...
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
You know, my ex wouldn't tell me how she made fried chicken, so I went to (fill in your favorite chicken place) and had fried chicken overruns of almost 600%, because she wouldn't release the open source code to the recipe.
It's kind of funny to see Transdyn pull the fast one on Honeywell that you always see developers do to small doctor's offices - refuse to hand over the source code.
Let's see, Transdyn says the code is proprietary, so when Honeywell tries to tweak it to work with the Big Dig, Transdyn sues them for theft of intellectual property.
Is Transdyn that new SCO subsidiary??
Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.
This is just one reason why governments should pay only for Free Software with taxpayer dollars...
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
You know, this is like saying city employees are abusing their per-diem because they tossed that 20 cents change into the tip jar at Subway's or something..
.. that (at least in the UK) government overspends on IT is quite common, so I'm not overly surprised really.
http://www.computing.co.uk/news/1139418
"So there he is, risen from the dead. Like that fella, E. T." - Father Ted Crilly
So, let me get this straight: the problem was settled out of court for $350,000, but not before it had cost over $10 Million in over-runs and "damages".
Once again, a triumph for dumbasses in Project Management everywhere. I guarantee you nobody lost their job over this. Not having the foresight to either keep the code Open, or secure the rights to the code when the contracts were signed, they should be though.
I've got a bad attitude and karma to burn. Go ahead. Mod me down.
I wonder if the open code requirement was in the contract -- it sounds like it wasn't...
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
If not necessarily free as in FSF, at least open like OSF...
Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.
karma police: arrest this man, he talks in maths; he buzzes like a fridge, he's like a detuned radio. [radiohead]
Whenever I've written software for the federal government, they get the source code and everything they need to maintain the software themselves or have someone else do the work.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Transdyn have a SCADA system called Dynac. Now Honeywell have a contract to build the next phase of the control system and Transdyn "refused to turn over the Dynac source code to Honeywell, claiming that the technology was proprietary". Do the Project Managers even know that SCADA software is almost always a trade-secret, like Windows or anything else? Just because Dynac had been modified as part of the project does not mean that it is state property, or Open Source or anything at all, unless the contract says that.
I stole this
(any geek here with a tunnel in his backyard?)
"/me puts tinfoil hat on and raises hand"
No, it's a reason to always make sure that you specify in the contract that you wholly own any software that you have commissioned.
Seriously, with an off the shelf product, I can fully understand the company keeping the source, etc to themselves. But for bespoke software? If you pay me to write code for you, I expect you to want to own it completely, not licence it from me. Sure, I may use a library that I want to keep hold of, but even then, I'd expect you to licence it from me in such a way that you can take teh whole lot and give it to a third party to support/maintain/modify on your behalf.
Hey, it'd be better for me if you didn't, and were tied to me for future work, but that's not a reasonable expectation.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
The Mass Turnpike Authority are the biggest f'cking crooks.
They shouldn't even exist. It was formed to build the Mass turnpike. The tolls were added to pay the debt of constructing it. It was stipulated by law that it would be toll free once the debts were repaid. It should have been toll free in the 1960s. They keep spending money so it will never be finished.
These are the guys trusted with god knows how many billions?
I particularly like that they paid some outrageous amount (millions and millions, 48?) for a lot for material disposal, never used it, (here's the kicker) gave it back to the previous owner for free! People should be in jail for the shit that's going on.
-William Shatner can be neither created nor destroyed.
Just a typical contract screw up.
....And a wonderful example of how to use screw ups to screw up others. I bet Transdyn has people just to find out holes in such contracts
I know nothing about this type of software, but hundreds of millions of dollars sounds like an awful lot. I gather that this is not the first attempt to develop such software, that it is a category that has been around for some time. Why is this not a relatively inexpensive matter of buying or licensing some off-the-shelf system and configuring it, rather the way people buy a database system and then set up their own record structures, specialized queries, and so forth? Can anyone explain why this would cost such an enormous amount?
What a strange policy! I can't imagine that there is any interesting news outside of the Boston area. After all, things are pretty peaceful between 128 and 495, and there isn't anything outside of 495.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
The Big Dig is a huge waste of money. When I was working out in Boston, Congress told Mass. "No more money" and then proceeded to fire the guy heading up the project. (This was about 5 years ago).
I watched them take down a bridge, then actually rebuild the same bridge. I don't know what exactly they accomplished, but it just seems like a stupid thing to do. There are so many unaccomplished goals, you would think that breaking down and rebuilding would be tasked for a later date while they focused on doing things that actually provided a tangible improvement.
When I think about Government Waste, I think about how my schools were run. Every school I ever went to from elementary school through college was wrought with waste and mismanagement - and those people all had a real desire to improve things. Now make the organization millions of times bigger with employees that could give a care and you end up with a trillian dollars in waste all from situations like this where it took months for somebody to say "hey, if this is costing us so much money wouldn't it make sense to just settle and move on?"
The apathy that government employees have is staggering. If half of the government organizations simply had one whistleblower that alerted the press about waste that they witnessed, we would... well, we'd be in the same situation because nobody would do anything about it... but theoretically we could reduce waste by billions of dollars.
Why is it that after all this time and all these budget overruns that the people of Mass. haven't just said "This is a bad idea. Lets kill it!"? Eventually, they'll just call the project done and we'll have another Bradley Fighting Vehicle on our hands.
We are going to build a computer system, costing One BILLION dollars!!
"So there he is, risen from the dead. Like that fella, E. T." - Father Ted Crilly
That's not really the angle I was thinking about. I was thinking more along the lines of the fact that it's the government paying for this, which means that it's taxpayers' money. It would be even more important to get the source code if it were off-the-shelf software, because it would give more benefit to the citizens. I mean, if it's really "government for the people" then when the government buys something, it ought to belong to the entire public (if possible), right?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
The application is probably too specific (a traffic management system for tunnels) that open sourcing it wouldn't have helped society too much (any geek here with a tunnel in his backyard?).
With good software engineering there would be tons of great reusable code underpinning the system that would hugely benefit the open source movement and, in theory at least, make it cheaper and faster to develop software for other government projects.
What you'd really need is a set of standards for government software development that ensures the documentation needed to reuse code is part of the deliverable.
The original bid went out in 1994 according to the article - which at that point access to source code was not a foreseeable issue for a lot of people in government purchasing departments.
Also, this project was slated to take nearly a decade, at which point it was more than likely that other software might be available that would be able to handle the task.
It's interesting to note that on top of the $10M, Honeywell upped their charge from a bidded $104M to $188M and explains away their cost overrun as a result of this dispute. So really, we're looking at now 94 Million Dollars being blamed on some poor schmuck in a purchasing department for not knowing that he should have included a source code clause in one of the 85 contracts he supervised that quarter.
Now the purchasing people I know would blacklist any contractors associated with that kind of catastrophe, but then again, I don't know any of the bozo's working on the Big Dig.
I understand that things can get out of hand occassionally and sometimes deadlines get missed and costs get to be over-budget. But nearly 100% over budget with no end in site? Just for this piece of the overall project that is wrought with this kind of thing? Maybe you shouldn't be hiring your project managers from the "welfare-to-work" program.
How the people have to pay and pay
Fight the price increase, go with Open Source Software
Get the Big Dig back under way!
That would be a tinfoil hard hat, right?
/me wonders if the canary also has a tinfoil hat.
The Big Dig wasn't meant to make our commute any less arduous, it wasn't meant to educate our children, it wasn't meant to be anything other than a huge public works project which would inevitably become corrupted and suffer huge cost overruns- check out the history of the Brooklyn Bridge.
The whole point of the Big Dig was to free up the land where the above ground artery ran. This is a huge, nearly priceless benefit for Boston. Not only does Boston regain several billion of dollars in downtown real estate- but it re-attaches the North end and Longwharf to the rest of the city. Cut off from the highway, those neighborhoods were difficult and unpleasant to get to, and severely devalued by the big ass highway running right past them. The benefit will be to make a more livable, more walkable city, with a downtown worth visiting.
yes, if you're in the US you're paying for it in taxes
HTSI eventually managed to recover. Lockheed royally screwed up their contract with NASA so it was ended early and HTSI managed to win on recompetes - by slitting their own throats but that is a story for another day... HTSI negotiated a way to end their involvement in Big Dig early (I guess HTSI learned a lesson and will only get involved in federal level contracts). Rumors are that Transdyn are negotiating to get back into writing the code for Big Dig. Hopefully they will have better luck the second time around. I'm sure there are lots of helpful comments in the current source revs in the ITS software for whoever develops it (particularly Transdyn :P)
I think it's a perfect example of why any custom software developed with taxpayer dollars should be required by law to be open source!
You wouldn't get into this mess if states would pass a law like that. Look at the figures, 104M for a transportation manageent system? Most of us know that probably could have been done for close to $20M.
If you have a big enough private company, you start seeing the same kind of attitude. "It is not my money." and a shrug. I think it has to do with volume and inertia, not with private/public.
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
Heh, well, there's Worcester, but well... it's Worcester. :(
Georgia 400 was built as a toll road. The tolls were only to go to maintaining the road and paying it off. Then came the secret contracts that were leaked where the money was being used for "other" things. Now they just pass laws to circumvent promises made before.
Once a government gets a taxing authority THEY NEVER WILLFULLY give it up. That is one reason SPLOST (special local option sales taxes) fail miserably anymore. No one wants to vote them in as they government still raises taxes even after getting a tax they claim negates the need for further ones.
Governments for the most part no longer serve the people, they serve themselves. They are just the bigger example of what went wrong with our schools.
When the customer is no longer the focus and your existance is then its time to shut it down.
That is probably the biggest reason why I so hate all these municipal "Wi-Fi" ideas. They start out with good intentions but by the end of the day they are glorified job programs rife with nepotism and corruptness.
As for the Big Dig, what pissed me off the most is how many people just shrugged as if waste of this sort was to be expected and therefor "OK". What does that tell you about our society?
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
It may not be a viable open source project like most of the projects we associate on a daily basis with open source (linux, asterisk, whate have you). But if this project was open source it would have avoided this mess entirely. Honeywell could compete with Transdyn on this project without Transdyn having a strangehold on it because you'd have to start from scratch if you go with someone else.
~Lake
Okay, I suppose that in a highly technical sense, there is Worcester, but yeah, does it _really_ count? I don't think so.
Worcester's basically the place that mothers tell their kids about to make them eat their vegetables or whatever. And it's not an interesting place.
Certainly I think we can all agree that there's nothing further out, that the cosmos more or less ends at 495 except for Worcester which is sort of barely attached by 9 and the Pike.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
To give you an idea of "How this can happen"
UK's NATS has had its share of problems. Their air traffic control system was supposed to go operation in 1996. Instead, the £623m Swanwick centre opened in 2002 - six years late and £180m over budget.
And the kicker at the end of the article, is that this brand new system is dependent upon an ancient mainframe! (the point of the article I linked to is that the mainframe is the bottleneck and problems bringing it online rippled out)
Of course, the US isn't any better. This one made Slashdot and I think the issue was that a technician forgot the reboot a windows pc (I SWEAR TO GORD I'm not making that up!).
The moral is; monolithic systems are hard. and not cheap.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Not quite. Its ( I believe ) a primarily state funded project. We people in Western Mass ( Springfield area ) are the ones being screwed by Boston. We pay higher insurance so the crappiest drivers don't have to, we have to pay for the Big Sinkhole.. I mean Big Dig and we're not the ones going to benefit from it.
UPS Sucks
Well, considering that good old Mass-a-crap-a-chu-shits has received federal money for thier project (last stat i saw put it between 15 and 20 billion), you're the one of the fine tax paying citizens footing the bill. Public schools or a better looking Boston?
Consider it this way: 15 billion = 1,000 new schools at 15 million a piece. God bless america!
Wrong. It's an Interstate highway project, which, like all Interstate highway projects, is 90% federal-funded.
Worcester's basically the place that mothers tell their kids about to make them eat their vegetables or whatever. And it's not an interesting place.
Certainly I think we can all agree that there's nothing further out, that the cosmos more or less ends at 495 except for Worcester which is sort of barely attached by 9 and the Pike.
B-b-but surely! Worcester is where Worcester sauce comes from! How can that not be interesting!
And what was that about the 9? Worcester is on the 5 (the M5) halfway between Gloucester and Birmingham.
You'll be telling me next that Boston isn't in Lincolnshire.
Now, I don't know whether the cosmos ends near Worcester or Boston, but I can tell you that there's nothing of interest north of the Watford Gap (or west of Reading for that matter). What I want to know is why the Watford Gap isn't anywhere near Watford.
-- Steve
I think this is not really a case to bring up the whole open source debate. The application is probably too specific (a traffic management system for tunnels) that open sourcing it wouldn't have helped society too much (any geek here with a tunnel in his backyard?).
I beg to differ: Had the government had an opensource policy in place ( yeah yeah, 10+ years ago ), this would have obviously negated at least this whole silly episode, saving quite a bit in cash: Thus helping society out by saving it.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
It should since much of the money came from the Federal goverment.
Western Mass (Springfield area)?
What the hell is that? Massachusetts doesn't go any further west than Worcester. There's just nothing past there. And no reason even to go that far.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
The term is "westawoosta" (english: "West of Worcester"). Westawoosta is Bostonian for "terra incognita", which is latin for "unknown land", which -- as far as Bostonians are concerned -- means that there's nothing worth knowing from the western edge of I495 all the way to the California border.
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
By the time I left MA in 1997, I well knew that the Big Dig was mostly Federally funded (which is how these project scams are sold to the public -- the money is "free" from the government, so in their vast stupidity the people jump at getting something "free"). That could have changed since then, but I doubt it. Go check your facts, Sir Geek! (Verily and forsooth.)
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
To me, this sounds like a management mistake in the sense that they either hired the wrong people, or had no one qualified to do IT hiring/etc, and as a result didn't get everything necessary into the contract?
I mean seriously, if you abstract and think that you plan on using a second company to build off of the progress of the first, naturally they are going to need the source code- expecting them to reverse it is absolutely silly.
I expect they could've researched, built, and deployed StarTrek transporters in every home in the GBA.
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
Cala-what?
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
actually, the reason you pay the insurance you do is because mass has state regulated insurance prices for autos. one of the reasons that you cant get progressive or geico in mass is because the state sets the price structure for all insurance.
if you have a clean record you are on the good side of the structure, if not you are on the bad side of the price structure. Where you are in the state only factors in with theft rates.
that said, insurance is expensive here.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
Free Software Foundation hang out in Boston. For $10M, they could come up with quite a lot of project management software. They'd retain the copyright, for sure, but they'd license it on terms that made sure the Big Diggers (and everyone else on the planet) could get the source code whenever they might want it. No disputes there !
It's the best way.
No, no. We're talking about New England. Which is to say, Better England. It's a replacement for the old one.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
It might matter to you, maybe not. But I (as well as all other residents of Massachusetts) would like to thank YOU (and most other residents of this Country) for footing most of the bill. I bet you didn't know that you paid for it. Thanks again =)
A) This project is largely state funded.
B) Massachusetts sends more cash to D.C. than it receives. Unlinke, say, Georgia.
// This is not a sig.
Does this matter to anyone outside of Boston, at all?
Well, let's see... it's only one of the largest engineering feats in history, right up there with the Chunnel and the Hoover Dam. So, I don't know. Does anyone at Slashdot care anything about engineering? Or is it all knitting enthusiasts?
// This is not a sig.
What's better is that it's Federal Money :) Thank you everyone who will never use the new road ways.
Sadly I left boston just before they opened the first stretch, ah well.
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
I was having a conversation about this very topic with my brother in law the other night. He's a civil engineer who worked on the big dig for a number of years, until he decided to get out while his sanity was intact.
We were discussing the now infamous leaks in the tunnel. The basic reason the tunnel leaks comes down to politics. Back in the day, ordinary people were treated as less than pawns when transportation projects were planned. They'd think nothing of bulldozing an entire historic neighborhood if it made some phase of the project a bit easier. And they put roads whereever the straightedge put the line, and anything the line went over be damned. Douglas Adams fans are familiar with this attitude. Boston neighborhoods have suffered particularly from this way of doing things. The West End, which was an ethnic neighborhood very similar to the now toney North End, was simply leveled in the name of "slum clearance", which meant razing the cozy little brick neighborhood and putting up massive, antiseptic, windswept concrete structures. When the original Central Artery was planned, they did not have the chutzpah to raze the old Faneuil Hall and it's marketplace, but they did plop a huge highway down between it and the waterfront. This process delayed the redevelopment of the old industrial waterfront for years, probably cost the economy billions.
This process was so egregiously insensitive that entire political careers were made opposing transportation projects (how else does a guy like Mike Dukakis get to be governor?). People swore that never again would they destroy a neighborhood for the convenience of a transportation project. The political pendulum has swung so far the other way, that the decision was made when the new Central Artery was planned not to destroy a single building more than was physically necessary. As you know, in any engineering project, when one priority rises to the top, the others have to drop. That includes cost and water proofing.
The way to accomplish this priority was to build the new highway almost entirely within the footprint of the old one, while the old one continued to run, not to mention avoiding any disruption of Boston's utilties, some of which date to the 19th century. The process was compared to doing open heart surgery on a patient while the patient played a game of tennis.
Now, the leaks. In order to build the new tunnel more or less on the footprint of the old one, they excavated on the sides and built a slurry wall by injecting concrete into the excavation. Is it any surprise that it leaks? But, they did manage to build the thing without disrupting neighborhoods, other than the regular rerouting of traffic. And the artery, amazingly, actually does work -- traffic flows much better than it did before. And no building, no matter how old, unatrractive and decrepit, was taken down unless absolutely necessary, and cost be damned. But of course the tunnel leaks, and now Bechtel is stepping up and performing its predestined role as scapegoat. The rumors say that Bechtel was the best choice for this role because as a firm with strong Republican connections working on a Democrat instigated project, they wouldn't be sued quite as much.
And thus the political excesses of one era make up in a rough (but expensive) way for those of another.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
If there was no Worcester, where would they have motorcross and rodeos?
// This is not a sig.
This is a big large engineering project which at this point has costs approaching the development of the space shuttle. They are attempting to fundamentally transform the city of Boston, and while this is a very honorable intention, have made the project into a mockery. It is years and billions of dollars overdue, and if you couldnt actually see the snail's pace of progress they are making, would be up there with Duke Nukem for vaporware awards.
While not as revolutionary as something like the tunnel between France and England, it is nonetheless very a large undertaking that is attempting to transform a city. It has a very interesting history, as Boston's traffic problems in many ways stem from its attempt to be a "city of the future" and building highways/skyways cutting through the city before the federal government started building/funding interstates.
In summary, if large engineering projects, urban planning and traffic engineering, local politics interacting with national politics, project management, and case studies in how projects grossly overrun their projected costs interest you, this should interest you even if you were not previously aware of the Big Dig.
(Note: I find this quite interesting and I live over 500 miles away)
How about New Bedfahd (New Bedford) and Fall Rivah (Fall River)? You can't forget the cities that export cocaine in quantities like they do! We supply the drug dealers for miles and miles. I once saw a cashier handed a dollar bill at the store I work at in New Bedford which was COVERED with coke. Whaling city - Whaling Industry + Big Fishing Port + Drug Imports = One Dirty City
For anybody else who has lived somewhere other then boston (I grew up in California). Some useful facts.
Boston is a really small city. It's well-known, so most people don't realize this. To give you a sense of scale:
Boston is 43.68 square miles: http://www.mass.info/boston.ma/facts.htm
LA city is 465.9 square miles.
http://www.ci.la.ca.us/facts2.htm
LA county is 4,084 square miles.
But a lot of people live here.
And they can't seem to decide on one form of transportation.
So far the subway seems the most rational, and it's not really rational (what's funny is all directions for the subway are given in relation to Boston, not using, north, south, etc). But basically it's a weird mash of trains, buses and cars, and nothing is done well. It's always half-assed. Even the subway system, which is the best system they got, doesn't bother to extend much beyond boston proper, so you have to drive or take the rail to get to the T, and they didn't think to put any large parking structures nearby the stations.
And now, for once, they are trying to build an actual highway (more then 6 lanes.. omg! ), (ok the turnpike occasionally has 8 lanes) and underground to boot. So, of course, they're totally fucking it up.
So basically boston is:
Small
Crowded
Filled with lazy people who don't want to walk anywhere.
And filled with people who think eight inches of snow is a "emergency condition". Hey, if buildings aren't decimated, its weather, not a natural disaster...
And also, many of the people here are totally narcissitic. There are really people here with no concept of a world beyond boston.
Well, yes. If you are in the US, you're paid for that software -- or maybe you didn't. Depends on the contract that was written on your behalf.
It's really a story about a big goof up in software procurement -- like the Oracle/California story from a few years back.
The interesting thing is that Mass was looking at a move towards open source in government procurements -- which might have prevented this problem. Last I heard, there was legislator making a stink about it. This is an example of how open source does really more closely resemble what people think they ought to be able to do with information.
As a software story, it has interesting aspects. Software often is a linchpin item in much larger projects. I know somebody who manages some good sized state contracts in the environmental field who has difficulty get competitors to bid because the firm that has one the last several contracts has control of the source for some small but critical pieces of software, that allows them to control the flow of information. She wanted to contract out the reverse engineering of the software, but ran into issues on the agency's IT department policies, which say the IT department has to control all the IT contracts. The IT department would prefer to develop all applications in house, even though they don't understand this particular application area, and don't have the staff to do it in any case. Any delays in the software development process could trigger lawsuits and fines.
I've suggested that she put a clause in the next contract requiring all software delivered to be under GPL, which would solve the problem.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Normally, you wouldn't be saying much... but all this coming from someone who grew up in LA?!?
Now, that's impressive.
There is this local construction project that is widening a 5-mile stretch of highway from 2 to 4 lanes. To date, is has taken over 3 years and is just over halfway done. I'm not a civil engineer, but how the fuck can it take so long to pave 5-miles of road?
Hmmm...does Bill Gates own this comoany??
But be honest, if you were negotiating with someone and thought you could get away with tying them to you for the next phase, you'd do it, wouldn't you? The government should have insisted on owning all the software, but when they didn't, you can't blame the coders for taking advantage of it. Wild guess: perhaps they offered to do it cheaper if they could keep ownership of the software? We know how governments go for the low bidder and don't look too closely about how they're making that low bid.
I am trolling
Since the 9-11 hijackers got on board the aircraft with weapons at Boston, due to slipshod security there, and now the whole USA is suffering under the police state run amok... then Massachusetts owes the rest of the country a massive debt it'll take aeons to repay if it's even possible to ever repay.
Oops! I forgot who was likely to read that. I meant: Calamari, which is some sort of squid caught in some Pacific Ocean thingy out west somewhere.
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
Here are your recent submissions to Slashdot, and their status within the system:
/. editors to post a relevant article???
/. LAST MONTH!
/. for recent news. All you get from this place is the old and stale.
* 2005-02-28 15:58:21 Software ownership battle adds $10M to cost of 'Big Dig' (Politics,Programming) (rejected)
Who do you have to be sleeping with to get the
I sent this story into
Pathetic.
Don't look to
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
If you open source things like traffic pattern control, you greatly open the possibilities of knowlegeable hackers. If the spec is all over the internet, what's stopping a little social engineering from making my commute into a four hour nightmare?
Oh yeah, I think I heard about the Pacific Ocean once. I seem to recall that under the charters that the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonies were originally set up under that our western border is out there, wherever it is. I don't see why this would have changed in the intervening 300 something years.
Obviously it's not very productive territory, but it'd probably be a good idea to have the Dept. of Revenue make sure that anyone out there is paying their taxes.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Its a matter of public trust, and public funds. They should ALWAYS buy the source code. In fact, if they can't make a case for national security, it should become open source code.
If a company doesn't want to sell them the souce-code or enter into a non-competition agreement with them, they don't have to.
Failure to buy the source code is a prime example of buying a "Pig in a poke." It may cost more but I'd rather pay more and get the product than get stuck with something that can't be modified without paying outrageous prices or worse, having unmodifiable code when the company changes line of business or goes bankrupt.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Are you kidding. I want to know about government X-Rays when they kill the canary, and tinfoil will block them[1].
[1]Anyone who wears a tin foil hat will believe that.
In Soviet Russia, the tunnel digs you!
Please try to get your Russian historical referrences correct in the future.
What's to stop a hacker from turning your visit to slashdot into a nightmare? Security, well thought out and gone over with a fine toothed comb ( apache ).
Big projects get more eyes, critical projects ( ie: stop lights ) get more experienced eyes.
I'll tell you what, i wish most of the lights in my town were controlled by something I helped bug test. Most of the time, you sit there and wait for the damn thing to cycle. I see the sensors in the road, but it doesn't seem to do anything. Even the ones that seem to have sensors seem to only do partial reads of the sensors. It's absurd.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
They barely had the time and finances to go over THE PHYSICAL LEAKS (by that I mean real water & flooding) with a fine tooth comb... you really think they paid for top IT security? They close that tunnel regularly because pieces are falling off, I'd bet the code is unchecked spaghetti too; and that bet goes up when you mention to me that the company is insisting it's proprietary. Besides, while the project is in development you may have lots of eyes... but someone with a home EEPROM'er and all the controller source code could have a field day. Get a good hard hat and a van, and it's off into the manholes of the financial district you go. It's speculation, sure... but I don't see why proprietary for a system like this is such a bad or obnoxious concept.
It is all BUSH'S FAULT! This is part of his stupid homeland security plan!!
Message to MODS: Please give me a bonus karma and a few insightful points here. You know I'm right.
Correct. We have state regulated insurance for one reason.... To keep the rates down for the crappy Boston Drivers.
UPS Sucks
I'm glad there are still people who enjoy civil engineering.
Cut off from the highway, those neighborhoods were difficult and unpleasant to get to, and severely devalued by the big ass highway running right past them.
I'm a huge fan of the Big Dig, but this is the one aspect that (as a resident of the North End) I was really, really not looking forward to. The North End wasn't unpleasant or difficult to get to if you WALKED like humans are designed to. If you DROVE, well, serves you right.
The North End is a neighborhood. A real, honest-to-God urban neighborhood, like the kind you see in old movies like The Godfather. Kids were raised there, went to school there, grew up and bought apartments or started businesses there.
Over the past two decades, but increasingly over the past few years, the rental prices for North End units has increased astronomically. "So?" you ask. "Who gives a shit about some cocksucker 20-something hotshot lawyer making 6 figures paying a few extra grand a year?"
Well, the North End wasn't filled with those kinds of people. It was filled with little old Italian ladies that like to sell lemonade on the corner during the feasts. That ugly abortion known as the Expressway was the one thing keeping the rats at bay. Now that it's reconnected with the rest of Boston, they've come home to roost.
The pattern is essentially the same: Grandma Leone, who's lived in Apartment Whatever on Salem St. for the past 80 years of her life, has her rent raised from $350/mo. to $1600/mo. She can't afford it, and has to move to one of the several old-folks homes in the neighborhood (there are a couple, and they're filled with some of the saddest stories you'll ever hear).
The crazy part is that one of the biggest tourist draws of the North End--the "Little Italy" aspect--are slowly being priced out. Now all that remains is a bunch of Italian restaurants. Oh, gee, how "authentic". Just like fucking Mulberry St. in New York.
Almost half of the cost of the Big Dig was spent on appeasements for current residents. HALF. So, for example, let's say there's going to be some noise on Endicott St. for a couple months while they're working. "Oh no!" cries the landlord. "All my tenants are going to move out!" (Or other sundry bullshit). So the city says, "Ok, how about we professionally sandblast the front of your building, free of charge?"
The only way they could get this kind of project completed without hundreds of thousands of people gumming up the works was to basically bribe them. But the parent poster says, this wasn't greedy corporations. This was greedy citizens who (quite rightly) know a cash-cow when they hear it MOO.
now I know where my hard earned tax payers dollars went... and now I know why the damned thing leaks... too much time spent on BS to actually get somethign accomplished... everytime I drive through that tunnel on 93S, I can only think of the movie daylight...
As we say in Saugus, once you pass 128 civilization gets sketchy. Once you pass 495 you leave it behind...
Massachusetts is a huge proponent of open source. There was an article with references about some of the open source stuff going on there here.
Sadly I left boston just before they opened the first stretch
They've actually opened part of it? I bet someone that Duke Nukem Forever would be out before any part of the Big Dig would be open to traffic. Damn.
Crappy? Boston drivers are excellent drivers. They have to be, because in Boston there is no margin of error for anyone that's less than excellent.
Weaving around stupid pedestrians, dealing with chuckholes and broken pavement, speeding while bumper to bumper, driving on the shoulder of 128, cutting across rotaries, reading a map while driving, hunting for parking, etc. It's all just evolution in action. And it's resulted in Boston drivers being the top-notch predators of the road in North America.
Of course, no one likes a bloodbath, so there's a lot of polite behavior: if someone has unused space ahead of them, or isn't approaching their turn or lane at maximum speed, it's understood that they're inviting other people to go for it. After all, those drivers not speeding more than, oh, 20mph or so, clearly aren't in a rush and wouldn't want to hold up other people.
Fortunately, the North End notwithstanding, there have been few attempts to cross-breed Boston drivers with their counterparts in Italy. The result would probably be too fearsome to describe. There may be a treaty prohibiting it. I wouldn't be surprised.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
I worked on the BigDig software. Of the $15 billion total cost, maybe $250 million total went to software. The rest went to construction costs -- they basically built many sections of tunnels through the middle of a busy city, while traffic continued to flow over them.
This is VERY different from the normal 'cut a trench, lay your road, cover over the tunnel' method, and is WAY more expensive.
Now Boston is out of money for the BigDig, but there is maybe $50 million more needed for software mods, and $300 million more needed for stopping the leaks. That money has to come from somewhere, and Boston has concluded it should come from the contractors. Meanwhile, Boston is trying to 'cost recover' a few hundred million from the project to reduce the 'overrun'.
Not a good situation, but it's not nearly the "no end in sight" situation the FUD people describe.
We eventually settled for a code escrow arrangement. That's not Open Source, but it met our needs.