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U.S. Fed Goes Brand Neutral
Rollie Hawk writes "The White House and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) sent out notice this week that government purchases, including in IT, need to be open to many brand names. 'We are concerned the use of brand name specifications in agency solicitations may have increased significantly in recent years, particularly for information technology procurements,' according to the OMB. AMD is certainly happy with this news, having long complained of the unholy marriage between the Fed and Intel. Perhaps this will even open the way for Linux and other open-source options being chosen over Microsoft and the like. If this works out, it will lead to a better fiscal situation on many fronts. The increased competition will lower the cost to taxpayers (though the money will still get spent somewhere) and the wider spread of contracts will help competitors to chip away at the dominance of Microsoft and Intel."
Mods; forgive my posting as AC, but I'm not really supposed to talk about this aspect of my job... hehe.
Anyways, you have no idea how fucked up this can actually get. Some parts of the government actually have policies which mandate that they buy from multiple competitors. In the industry that I'm in (contractor for the air force), this gets a bit out of hand. One project that I worked on involved a jet engine which was the result of a joint-effort between two companies which have been competing against each other for the last 50 years.
Needless to say, the whole thing is an enormous clusterfuck. Neither company wants to share data with the other. Both sides use different notations, document formatting, and so forth, and neither bothered to find a middle ground. So that left our company in the middle, in sea of miscommunication and scrambled data. Add this to the pre-existing incompetence of the army at large, and christ knows how they ever managed to get this plane off the ground.
Whatever happened to the government requirement that systems and technology be POSIX compliant? I know I first was aware of that bent back in the early nineties, because that's when I went to work with Microsoft under the auspices of NT and its "POSIX compliance". It's also when I quit working for Microsoft when at the NT POSIX sub-system presentation (video-taped for posterity's sake) "Margaret" prefaced the presentation with the announcement (and I paraphrase), "Before we get started with the presentation, let me make clear that as far as Microsoft is concerned, we don't care about the POSIX sub-system, we don't intend to support it, and we don't intend to do anything with it in the future. It's simply a check box so we can get Government contracts."
I thought the move to POSIX compliant systems was a step in the right direction, and I'm not sure I've seen any news or publicity to the contrary. Guess something's changed...
For the record, a subsequent followup phone call to Larry Kroger at Microsoft confirmed the message in a strong way....
...on many mission critical systems. I happen to know the latest and greatest submarine Fire Control and Sonar systems run on Linux. I'd say about 90% of the stuff that runs Windows is non-mission critical. If the sub,s LAN goes down, sure it sucks, but no one is going to die as a direct result...at least not on a 688. If we lose Fire Control or Sonar, we're screwed.