People hate on "design by committee", but the real issue is you have a bunch orgs all trying make the design as close to their shit pile of code that is already written. (Outside of that, I think multiple designers with open minds is a good thing, but I shouldn't digress too much.)

(My coworker made an astute prediction (only semi-jokingly) that eventually all the standardized binary interfaces would eventually transitively refer to all the other standardized binary interfaces as the inevitable conclusion of that phenomenon, and few stingy large orgs properly separating their external interfaces from internals.)

The solution here is to pay a specific contractor to do the design and validate with a demo deployment. Oncely once it is proven to work, and the government can then set up their own in-house (i.e. proove it is real open source by doing the tech transfer) is the full money paid out.

This is the computer equivalent of a drug bounty, basically. It's high time publicly-funded engineering doesn't just deepen private intellectual-property motes.

Depends on the definition of "failure". I'm sure lots of consultancies are doing very well with openstack!