31–36 of 36 posts
It is a sad state of affairs that the most technologically advanced government in history is incapable of rolling its own in-house tech. Taxpayers deserve better.
It is a sad state of affairs that the most technologically advanced government in history is incapable of rolling its own in-house tech. Taxpayers deserve better.
Here's a radical idea: One government worker sending a document to another government worker should not involve a proprietary, for-profit data format. With a hardcopy paper document this would obviously be unacceptable, but since digitization and software eating the world, we pay our fees to Microsoft and go about our merry way. I'm middle-aged and tired, I'm not going to fight this fight anymore. Maybe some day legi…
> Maybe some day legislators will grow fangs and start giving a shit about strategic interoperability. Not so long as their paychecks require them to not have fangs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are the taxpayers willing to pay higher taxes for IC government employees receiving Microsoft level salaries?
1. How many software engineers are necessary for the federal government to build its own office software, or at the very least contribute to open-source projects such as LibreOffice? Depending on the size of the team, this may be a drop in the bucket compared to the federal government's multi-trillion dollar budget, even if the developers made Microsoft-level salaries. Let's make a very liberal estimate: suppose ther…
How many developers/PMs/etc. are working on Office software at Microsoft? With 20 you might be several orders of magnitude off. Why would a government project be leaner?
What is more, at least where I live there is not even a salary structure allowing to pay developers those figures, while managers several levels above them would earn less. Hierarchy is everything in government organizations.
I'm surprised other countries put up with microsoft for basic things like email/word rather than a "must be built within country for security reasons"
I mean, of course they were, but it's definitely a weird situation.
It is a sad state of affairs that the most technologically advanced government in history is incapable of rolling its own in-house tech. Taxpayers deserve better.
The tech market makes progress through booms and busts, hype cycles, and bankruptcies. The government can't afford that, and it should not.
The taxpayers deserve the most efficient use of their tax dollars, and that's not through in-house tech.
The best you can probably get is public support for open source companies and open source products.