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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."
Into the politicians pockets of course! Just to make things look "neat".
Ask a silly question...
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
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
karma police: arrest this man, he talks in maths; he buzzes like a fridge, he's like a detuned radio. [radiohead]
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.
You know, what really gets me is how it's even possible to spend $452 million on a computer system. Even if you were building an entire ten-thousand user WAN across the entire UK, using fibre-to-desktop and optical switches, and specing crazy-ass Sgi workstations for each user..you'd not be close.
£425 million spent on a database. A big database with an interface. The sort of IT project companies roll out for customer databases, or workflow management systems. Hell, some Lotus Notes installations approach the size and complexity of the CBA system, and I bet they never cost half a billion pound to implement.
Consultant companies are scum sucking, do nothing, lackwitted money pits. Yet the system keeps them on the gravy train because of the convoluted bidding schemes placed exactly to keep these fuckwits sucking huge amounts of tax money to fail to implement a simple database. Fuckwits, the lot of 'em.
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.
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.
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
Look at this internet thing we are using. It has defined objects and interfaces and methods of accessing them. Apply the same principles to government IT projects. The government can define the objects and interfaces and keep control of them. The information stored is based on the input of forms that the goverment writes in the first place after all. With a published set of interfaces and objects to deal with a market would exist bringing in competition. The only alternative is better management of huge monolithic projects as we have at present which patently does not work.
You may think me a tired, old, cynic. I'd have to disagree about the tired bit.
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)
IMHO it sounds like somebody thought that the developers of the software was generic interchangable pork that could be used to buy votes locally & got burned when company A refused to play along...
Concur. This whole fracas happened because some moron project planner(s) assumed "softwares is softwares" and segmented the project in a way that was neither feasible nor logical, but was worth a few political brownie points.
If phases 1 and 2 both relied on a single product, the same company should have been contracted for both (best case), or the contract language should had explicit language guaranteeing the openness and transferability of all resources pertaining to the project (less desirable, based on the time it'd take for Company B to get up to speed on Company A's product).
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/. LAST MONTH!
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* 2005-02-28 15:58:21 Software ownership battle adds $10M to cost of 'Big Dig' (Politics,Programming) (rejected)
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