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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."
Perhaps this will even open the way for Linux and other open-source options being chosen over Microsoft and the like.
The government buys what its contractors tell it to. Thus, the only open source will get into the government is when the IBM's, EDS's and Oracle's of the world start pushing open source (or at least partial open source) solutions to the government. While there are many smart people in the government who like open source, they rarely make the spending decisions (and face it, MS and other proprietary vendors court the decision makers). The key is to raise awareness among the PHBs and to get the solution providers to push open source.
I knew holding my eMachine stock would pay off.
If you think
And some of them are the brightest people you may ever meet. Don't be such a bigot. I've had to interact with man federal agencies over the years and quite a few of them know exactly what they are doing. The problems often lie in the direction of contractors who come in and technically meet the letter of a contract, but in spirit leave something lacking, which allows overruns to happen.
I once had a very amusing talk with someone at the US Dept of Education. He knew what we needed to submit and what the issue I was raising meant, but try to get the contractor to understand it.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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.
Old spec:
Microsoft Word 2003
New spec:
Word processor which supports the following requirements:
{insert long list of specifications at least one of which is covered by a Microsoft patent}
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
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....