The quiet death of Ello's big dreams

And I have the exact same thought about providing software for government and other large organisations.

The number of "solutions" my public service employers paid millions for, that didn't fucking work properly or reliably is mental.

I'm really not sure how contracts keep getting signed by big organisations that don't impose massive penalties on providers for failure, but it they do. Or the sister org that finally had enough and wanted to switch providers, and had to go to court in order to be even be able to pay a large amount for the IP rights to the source code of their system, because they'd signed a contract that let the provider retain IP, and the provider really liked that sweet sweet taxpayer money for buggy bollocks. So naturally, when they contracted HP to maintain the system they ensured that the contract retained IP ownership for their org.

Haha, no, I'm kidding, they let HP keep IP rights on changes HP made, and later on had to fight HP in the courts so they could pay HP for the source to switch providers again after getting sick of being charged $2K (USD) by HP to update the text of a single link on a website.

And I keep thinking that I'd very much like to be in the market of earning millions by providing broken software to people making big decisions who aren't competent enough to jump to private sector, broken software is easy.

But then the guilt of stealing taxpayer money kicks in (it's not legally stealing, but morally, it's stealing. As the saying kinda goes, any great criminal needs a great lawyer, a great accountant, and a corporation), as well as the guilt of professional ethics.

(What's the old joke about software ethics? An ethical programmer would never write a function called destroyBaghdad, they'd write a function called destroyCity and pass Baghdad as a parameter.)

But look at Birmingham Council in the UK, bankrupted by shit software and Oracle's fearsome legal team. The entire fucking disgrace that is Horizon (although being fair to Fujitsu, nearly all of the evil was on their customer's side, it was only aided and abetted by Fujitsu employees lying in court).

In my country, IBM sued our government (and won) because IBM wanted to be paid even more for not delivering a massively expensive and broken project to the Police (INCIS), more recently our Education dept spent $180 million on a payroll system called Novopay (they also paid the provider Talent2 to administer payroll with it) that was terribly broken and underpaid some teachers (and perhaps more egregiously, slightly overpaid some teachers, then the provider would eventually realise and demand the teacher repay the overpayment be returned in full in a short timeframe or debt collectors would be brought in, and threats of civil litigation or criminal complaints were used to pressure them) to the extent that teachers had to go on strike to get the government to take it seriously.

Eventually the government took back the admin side of it, and then gave Talent2 another $45 million to get the system working, and are still paying them to maintain it today.

The idea of being in a market where delivering badly broken software leads to you getting paid another 25% of the upfront cost to get it actually working, and you don't get fired, is wild.

I suppose there's a reason that Oracle and similar are described as law firms that incidentally write software, but damn, they make crypto grifters look like complete amateurs.

And I'll begrudgingly admit that Oracle et al are selling a product with actual utility at least, as opposed to NFTs which I'd call digital tulip bulbs, but that is mean to tulip bulbs because they can at least be used to grow flowers.

I've seen 0 use cases for NFTs / ICOs that aren't gambling/unhinged speculation (usually with some fraud involved to make Number Go up to suck in the rubes), or just good old fashioned direct to the consumer fraud dressed up in complicated jargon.

The quotes further down from users who suddenly lost all of their content were sad to read. It sucks how often regular people get burned for taking tech companies at their word.

A sandwich costs $5 everywhere, and a car costs $30k everywhere, because that's just what those things cost to make.

It's relatively difficult to look at a web service and determine whether its running costs are normal guy hobby money, rich guy hobby money, or no seriously this won't last six months without VC money.

Decentralised and P2P systems run themselves, but it's hard for them to maintain a centre of gravity without offering something specific, and given that the network itself can't produce value out of thin air, it's probably not coincidental that the ones best able to maintain gravity are offering stuff stolen from elsewhere.

They are providing a foundation that gets built upon with every migration wave, and I think it’s plausible that they will eventually break into the mainstream.

Put another way, the fediverse is the first alternative that doesn’t need to “succeed” in order for development to continue. It’s a bootstrapped model. And so it can grow quietly, work out the usability kinks over time, and be ready to absorb users whenever they get fed up with the centralized platforms.