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$1 Bid Wins Government Open Source Software Purchasing Experiment (gsa.gov)

Posted by Soulskill on from the your-tax-dollars-at-surprisingly-hard-work dept.

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.

4 of 124 comments (clear)

  1. Work for free!! by DogDude · · Score: 1, Funny

    Yay! Nothing says "success" like working for free. Great job!

    --
    I don't respond to AC's.
    1. Re:Work for free!! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      You don't understand how this works. You sell the software for $1 as the lowest bidder to the government and sell the security holes to the highest bidder. "Open Source" makes this a bit tricky: you need to be good enough that discovering the security hole is hard.

      An excellent example is elliptic curve cryptography in NSA style: you construct the security hole by calculating instead of randomly choosing the constants the method depends on. Nobody can prove that you cheated and the source code does not contain any evidence either.

  2. Multipurpose fighter jet project is next up by frnic · · Score: 4, Funny

    Next up is a reverse bid on a Multi-Purpose Fighter Jet, they are expect the winning bid to be between $5 and $10...

  3. Re:Because it said government. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    After projected cost overruns, it'll be above $1B.