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."

Comments

Re:For those of us who don't live near Boston

[will_die]

The idea is to put in a 8-10 lane expressway under the city of Boston. They have a site at www.bigdig.com.
It has taken close to 20 year to do and has been extermly over run with greed, mismanagement, poor construction, and cost overruns.

Re:My Rights OnSubwayLine

[Anonymous Coward]

Read the FAQ!

Slashdot seems to be very Boston-centric. Do you have any plans to be more U.S.-centric in scope?

Slashdot is Boston-centric. We readily admit this, and really don't see it as a problem. Slashdot is run by Bostonians, after all, and the vast majority of our readership is in the Boston area. We're certainly not opposed to doing more stories about other cities, but we don't have any formal plans for making that happen. All we can really tell you is that if you're outside the Boston area and you have news, submit it, and if it looks interesting, we'll post it.

Re:For those of us who don't live near Boston

[DataCannibal]

So, it's a bit like software development. then?

Re:this is so miniscule compared to total cost- Fp

[photonic]

This is just one reason why governments should pay only for Free Software with taxpayer dollars...

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?). It looks much more like a case where the government failed to put proper clauses in the contract from the beginning. If they knew beforehand that a different company would be able to win the contract for the second phase, than the possible transfer of the code should have been in the contract for the first phase. Just a typical contract screw up.

Transdyn have to source

[basingwerk]

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.

You missed the point entirely

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Bad deal for Honeywell

[yakitori]

The segment of Honeywell that was involved with Big Dig was HTSI (Honeywell Technology Solutions Inc). HTSI is involved in alot of NASA or military related contracts (primarily ground stations or satellite control like HST, Landsat, etc). HTSI was formally Allied Signal which was formally Bendix (NASA followers should know the name). Lockheed became prime on a major NASA contract and began shrinking HTSI's role in it, so Big Dig was an attempt to branch out into Intelligent Traffic Systems to save jobs. Anyway, it was a disaster since day one. Folks here viewed Big Dig as the last stop to hell. Long mandatory hours with no vacations, constant deadline dates that were pushed back week after week, quarreling customers that literally threw chairs at each other. There were weekly 'farewell' lunches for employees as everyone started jumping ship. HTSI didn't receive the Transdyn software for years. What little that was received had to be completely rewritten (thousands upon thousands of lines of code) because it did not fulfill any of the necessary requirements. Boston refused to pay cost overruns to HTSI was the big kicker that made HTSI start to hemorrhage money. Big Dig was a losing cause.

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)

Re:Typical

[phayes]

RTFA (yeah, I know this is /.). The code was never open in the first place.

Company A wins the contract to do phase 1 by modifying their existing software product.

Company B wins contract for phase 2. Company A refuses to deliver source code as it contains significant proprietary info. Segue into N month court battle ending up with a settlement in which company B sublicenses company A's info (for an undisclosed amount) & A gets .3M$ from BigDig.

Company B goes way overbudet & negotiates a premature end to it's contract. BigDig is now negotiating with Company A to finish what it started.

The 10M$ pricetag is from 3M$ BigDig wished they could have fined Company A for, + 7M$ in overruns from Company B.

Opensource could have been a solution to the problems they encountered, but only if BigDig was ready to finance the development of the software from scratch. Company A came to the table with a big head start as they were only modifying their own existing software.

Supplementary info: Company A is Californian & Company B is local. 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...