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$1 Bid Wins Government Open Source Software Purchasing Experiment (gsa.gov)
An anonymous reader writes: A couple weeks ago we discussed a project from a software team within the U.S. General Services Administration. Its goal was to set up a portal to let developers bid on the creation of open source code needed by the government. From the beginning, they said it was an experiment, and now the results are in from their first project. The project was quickly bid all the way down to $1, and on Wednesday, the winner delivered a functional solution that met their criteria. They say, "When we received the $1 bid, we immediately tried to figure out whether it was intentional, whether it was from a properly registered company, and whether we could award $1. We contacted the bidder and we confirmed that the bid was valid, that the registration on SAM.gov was current, and that the bid would be the winning bid. It was a plot twist that no one here at 18F expected. This unexpected development will no doubt force us to rethink some of our assumptions about the reverse-auction model." Despite their surprise, the team feels this is proof that the system can succeed. They're now working to refine the process.
Race to the bottom bitches!
Yay! Nothing says "success" like working for free. Great job!
I don't respond to AC's.
and you thought off-shore was the race to the bottom?
Somebody was always going to do it "for free".
I initially read it as $1B
It's fine and dandy to feel good about selling something for $1. But what if fixes or changes are needed? What about potential training of users? What is the overall long term cost of this? Will the $1 bidder even be able to offer any after sale support?
I'm all for reducing costs, bloat and corrupt contracts. Just seems like something is missing here and not fully thought out.
Next up is a reverse bid on a Multi-Purpose Fighter Jet, they are expect the winning bid to be between $5 and $10...
Become a standard then start charging when there's no turning back.
Charging money for an open source product wouldn't make any sense anyway, since its open license would make it available to everyone and then some leech would undoubtedly use your unmodified code to undercut your bid without adding any value.
Instead, an open source product should always be offered for the smallest amount that constitutes a legal sale, and then income generated by supporting it for perpetuity. Leeches don't do support, they have no backbone.
And then, when all competent contenders are out of the picture, prices raise and quality drops. This is _not_ a problem where a capitalist competitive approach is a good idea, as this is not about standardized products that a lot of people can produce.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
You know we're sitting on four million pounds of fuel, one nuclear weapon and a thing that has 270,000 moving parts built by the lowest bidder.
Makes you feel good, doesn't it?
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
A Functional Solution for $1? Now that's efficiency!
And who said that government wastes taxpayer money?? ;)
I wonder if this low bid method of getting a government contract will lead to Oracle like maintenance costs in upcoming years. If their software is locked in what's to stop this from happening?
This is a match that does make sense; if you are a college student, you need evidence that you can produce worthwhile material. By producing open source software, you get a reputation that will make you seriously employable. Given you are going to work free anyway, you might as well produce something that is meaningful, as opposed to a piece of software which noone but your professor ever gets to see.
The code requirements:
Code must display the text "Hello World!" on the screen, followed by a line saying "Press to continue". The code will then read a text file containing the names Charlie, Art, and Barbara and sort them into alphabetical order.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
One dollar for the program. Okay. That's bragging rights.
How much is the support contract?
When politicians are involved, everyone loses.
The FEDGOV hates it when someone complies with all the rules, bids low, and complies with all requirements. The only thing it hates more is not spending more on "employment" and getting far more than it contracted for essentially for FREE, resulting in a rejiggering of the rules to "fix that".
JJ
But, were there also unit tests for the secret export of social security numbers? And for the phone call handing off administrator mode?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Where I work, some people work nights, weekends, and feel like the manager has a right to refuse PTO use when notified months in advance. I always ask them why they would work for no money, and why they'd let the manager play games with their money.
Then I see shit like this. Look, if you want to whore yourself out for whatever reason you like, don't let me stop you.
My money says this is simply a stunt. The code was already written and it's some golf buddies helping prove each other's theories out. The managers are toasting their success and the developer who wrote the code in 2010 is too busy working for slave wages to notice his code is being pimped out.
Man fuck this shit. I'm going to go be a fucking bum and piss on your shoes. More dignity in it.
The backdoor they put in is worth much more...
Government contracts out to private companies. Companies cost millions upon millions of dollars for stuff that still doesn't work right or meet the specs for years or even decades.
Government contracts out to open source contract for $1, promptly gets working product that meets specifications along with the source code to do it.
Many of us know the term FOSS (Free Open Source Software). Even at $1, the government is still overpaying for open-source software.
And what was their motivation? It's hard to believe that anyone anywhere would agree to deliver a custom developed software system for $1 unless there were some other motivations at work. They said that they contacted the bidder, but they didn't say who the bidder was. How can they be sure that this isn't a front company controlled by the Chinese government and low bidding work in the hopes that they will be given trust and awarded further government contracts that may provide better opportunities for espionage or sabotage? Aren't they even a little suspicious? If not, maybe they should be. When it looks to good to be true, it usually is.
capitalism starts to eat itself, as more and more work loses any relation to it's purposed monetary value. this is going to be fun.
You mean sell it at a loss? I suppose they could make it up in volume...
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I think the point of this project was to change the "spec is always incomplete" system. The OSS initiative is explicitly not for large projects, but for agencies that just need a little tool to do something quick, and don't want to bury themselves in a six month commercial bidding process. One imagines this will force the agencies to provide clear specs, in order to get accurate, non-negotiable bids. One imagines that revisions to the final product would be handled through the same bidding process.
If you need a change in closed-source software, you're locked into the original vendor. If you need a change in open-source software, anyone can do it.
They could have done it for 20% less by using PHP instead of Python. The government pays extra once again for technical decisions made in the private sector, just like it happened with healthcare.gov.
Next time a child is left behind, we'll know who to blame.
lucm, indeed.
It's a government contract. It's pretty much guaranteed to go over budget! By the time they're done, they could easily be 2-3 times over their original budget!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The government will likely also be confused and accidentally wrote the check for a billion dollars.:)
Let's see. $1 each for 2 million installations - now we are talking some real money, especially for a 1-person shop!
I used to say, let me find something I can sell to every person in China and profit a single penny on each...
Maybe now someone can fix Obamacare and write a backend for it that works the way it's supposed to.
This article is stupid. Of course it will cost less to develop a product if you hire contractors who cover their own costs out of pocket... but that doesn't happen in the real world. The problem with a $1 bid is that it took more than $1 worth of effort to submit the bid in the first place. The bidder is necessarily losing money.
Noone can sustain themselves doing that in the real world. Yeah, someone might take a bid slightly under cost in order to penetrate a new market, establish a new customer, or to serve as a loss-leader for support contracts. None of that applies in this case... this is entirely contrived.