Slashdot Mirror
Oregon Settles $6 Billion Lawsuit Over Oracle's Botched Healthcare Website (registerguard.com)
"While the crippled website eventually worked, Oregon failed to enroll a single person online [and] had to resort to hiring 400 people to process paper applications." An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes the AP:
The state paid Oracle $240 million to create its Cover Oregon website but ultimately abandoned the site and joined the federal exchange to comply with the Affordable Care Act... The state initially asked for more than $6 billion in punitive damages when it filed the lawsuit in 2014 against the Redwood City company, but Oregon ultimately accepted a package that included $35 million in cash payments and software licensing agreements and technical support with an estimated upfront worth of $60 million...
Six years of unlimited Oracle software and technical support included in the deal will save the state hundreds of millions of dollars in years to come and ends a bitter legal battle that has damaged Oregon's "collective psyche," Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum said in a statement. "The beauty of the deal is that if we choose to take full advantage of the free (software), we are uniquely situated to modernize our statewide IT systems over the next six years -- something we could not otherwise afford to do," she said.
"Oracle has insisted the website worked but former Gov. John Kitzhaber chose not to use it for political reasons."
Six years of unlimited Oracle software and technical support included in the deal will save the state hundreds of millions of dollars in years to come and ends a bitter legal battle that has damaged Oregon's "collective psyche," Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum said in a statement. "The beauty of the deal is that if we choose to take full advantage of the free (software), we are uniquely situated to modernize our statewide IT systems over the next six years -- something we could not otherwise afford to do," she said.
"Oracle has insisted the website worked but former Gov. John Kitzhaber chose not to use it for political reasons."
Ok, you win. For the most effective single-line summary of a multi-paragraph article I've ever seen.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
There's a strong anti-Oracle sentiment because they almost always fuck up projects, outsource everything, lock in everywhere... then get nasty.
So frankly, what's the point in automating at all, if it's going to be as expensive as a decent manual solution that would have been up and running in 3 months?
I keep having this argument at my office. The big bosses want to invest in a programming project that will supposedly eliminate the need for human intervention in a publication process. I keep pointing out that humans still have to look at the material before publication (witness Facebook's recent experiments with algorithms as news editors). But they are so dead-set against hiring a person with benefits that they'd rather spend twice as much buying hardware and writing software that only does half the job.
If they'd hired a person, the backlog would be cleared and the process would be working smoothly. Instead, we're on the nth redesign of the GUI that is nearly unusable because the engineers are in charge of designing it.