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Comment by cryptica | Hacker News Reader

> Agreed, it does not necessarily have to be open source. But my opinion is that if the taxpayer's money is used to pay for software, then that software should be open source.

Yes. The government has more than enough leverage to demand this. Skill was never the problem. The problem is bureaucracy; too many regulations and massive hidden corruption. The problem with the regulations is that they were designed with the explicit intent to stifle competition.

"Nobody got fired for choosing IBM" - This fact is pure corruption. I remember, when I was at university, one of the courses I took had a project management component and we did an assessment researching failed software projects and it turns out that there were a huge number of failed projects running in the hundreds of millions and even billions (and that was a lot of money at the time); always the same companies kept coming up. IMO, this is fraud, of a criminal nature. People should go to jail.

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The big system integrators are often pretty terrible at their jobs but it isn't the only cause.

Extremely expensive software projects in government have a common thread in every case I have first-hand experience with. The government has no consistent vision of what they want or who is the final arbiter of these decisions, and no person in the government is accountable for the outcomes. Both the requirements and responsibility are spread across so many people that for all practical purposes there are no clear requirements and no accountability.

The government software programs that run well in my experience have the organizational equivalent of a BDFL. A BDFL doesn't really exist in government; even when someone acts in that role they are often reassigned to other projects at random.

> IMO, this is fraud, of a criminal nature. People should go to jail.

I have been in companies getting money from government programs. It's not fraud from the government side, at least not for what I've seen.

The problem is that companies see government programs as a way to make easy money. If the government pays a company for X, that's because that company has expertise in X. So it's easy for the company to bullshit the government employees and sell them crap.

Companies abuse the government funding as much as they possible and legally can, and then we blame the government. And on top of that we would want fewer regulations? If you want to be able to punish abuse from companies, you need regulations, and you need to apply them.

>Companies abuse the government funding as much as they possible and legally can, and then we blame the government.

So, in well-known conditions of ineffective spending without competition government chose to waste money bypassing market? How that's not government's fault?

Not sure if you have a specific example in mind or speaking generally.

What I am saying is that generally, private companies abuse the government money when they can. Just like private companies enshittify their products to make more money. It's all about making money.

Why are governments getting bad software from companies? For the same reason users are getting bad software as well. The software industry produces money, not good software.

My point is that "private companies abuse the government money when they can" is well-known fact. Thus, government as a customer should make everything possible to buy software on competitive market basis. If govt chose easy way to blindly gave shitton of money to some company with vague acceptance criteria and got bad result in return - this is 100% govt fault.

My point is that they are genuinely trying. I have been in contact with such people, and they are not idiots.

They have government money that they want to spend wisely. And experts from private companies convince them that they can solve their problems.

If the government employee was the expert, they would not have to contact the private companies in the first place. The private companies know that, and they abuse their dominant position by convincing (sometimes downright lying) to the government employees.

It is a very difficult position to be in. It's not about buying a car and being able to just test it. Many times the government funding goes for some kind of R&D. Which makes it easy for the experts to bullshit them and never produce anything useful.

Those who say that it's 100% the government fault should maybe try to go work there. They could truly help their country, if they could actually do better. But chances are that they can't.

I am sorry for good people genuinely trying. I understand that it is a hard problem to solve - but private companies chose their contractors and suppliers and as well facing similar issues. Somehow private companies are managing to evaluate results and found accountable persons while governments are known for being very undemanding customers.

"We have tried hard, but failed" is still failure despite any good will. Good will with courage and having skills with competence are very different things and often govt employees have neither because otherwise they will be more successful using this skillset in private companies.

> but private companies

Two things:

* The government is often in the situation where they want to fund some effort, like R&D. Say China is way ahead of the US in drone technology, and the US wants to catch up because that's a risk (we see how drones are used in the military now). So someone will have money to spend on US companies who will do everything they can to get as much money as possible. How can the government employee know which company is abusing? First they are all abusing, and second they are all failing already (otherwise the government wouldn't be in this situation where they need to fund them). This is a very hard problem.

* When it is about buying e.g. an IT solution for the company, I have seen private companies fail just as much as governments. McKinsey and their friends do the same bullshit to everybody, be it government or private companies. Don't think that private companies don't waste money. It's just that when it is the government, it is transparent and we like to complain about the government.

> The problem is bureaucracy; too many regulations and massive hidden corruption

I keep hearing the "too many regulations" argument, and I totally disagree. Too few regulations (or rather no enforcement of them) resulted in the TooBigTech monopolies we have today. Of course, they got so successful because of the lack of regulations, but now it's simply impossible to compete with them. Removing regulations (assuming that there are regulations that impact them today, which I doubt) would help them, not the competition.

And we have precedents:

* Whenever the EU tries to do some antitrust, it impacts TooBigTech (which is almost exclusively US), and as a result the US bullies the EU to stop it. If regulations were weakening the EU, why would the US government fight them?

* Let's continue with the US as the example of fewer bureaucracy in this case (the complaint is that the EU cannot compete with the US because of the EU's bureaucracy): look at examples where a non-US company takes over a market (or threatens to take it over). Huawei smartphones (not the infrastructure like antennas, this is different), TikTok, DJI. What do US companies do to win against them? They lobby like crazy to add regulations that will stop the competition.

The US hasn't managed to compete with TikTok: they made it illegal instead.

When Huawei was becoming very big in smartphones in the US, they got banned.

The US hasn't managed to compete with DJI, and the biggest US drone companies are spending a ton of resources trying to get DJI banned. DJI is so superior that even banning them is tricky: it has to be done slowly because banning them right away would disrupt entire industries for lack of viable alternatives. That's how far US drones are from DJI drones.

"Too many regulations" is wrong. The successful players get protection from their government (be it the US or China), and it's high time the EU protected its own players, too. With regulations, just like the US and China does (when they don't abuse their dominant position to bully the EU).

That seems like a lot of words to basically just admit that Europe’s regulations are anti-competitive.

I especially enjoyed reading the logical fallacy of drone companies that are so small/non-existent that DJI cannot be banned quickly, but those same companies mysteriously have enough money to bribe politicians for a ban (and the much bigger DJI can’t outbid them).

Also: You wrote in a previous comment that nobody can compete with Apple due to lack of antitrust regulation:

> > Is there anything that stops today anyone from starting a new Google or a new Microsoft or a new Apple in Europe?

> The same thing that stops anyone from starting a new Google or Microsoft or Apple in the US, probably.

But now you are saying that Huawei was about to unseat them and therefore needed to be banned. So… which is it?

Wow, that's a lot of bad faith. I'll try once, and once only:

There has been a ton of money thrown at US drone companies in the last 10 years. A TON. From the government and from VCs. It's not that those companies are so small or non-existent: it's just that consumers do not buy their products. Which is why most drone companies have conveniently pivoted to the military now. And with the military funding, they have money.

And they have been lobbying A LOT to ban DJI, and they are winning that fight. But that does not mean that the consumers want to buy their US drones. DJI drones are still vastly cheaper and better, and professional users (including US government entities) rely on DJI. So much that it is unreasonable to just ban all existing DJI hardware. It has to come progressively so that those consumers can get used to paying a lot more to get worse drones.

There is no question here: without regulations, NOBODY can REMOTELY compete against DJI, period. If you don't understand that, then you don't understand the drone industry.

> But now you are saying that Huawei was about to unseat them and therefore needed to be banned. So… which is it?

Huawei and TikTok and DJI are Chinese companies. US people never forget to mention that they don't exactly play by the same rules (e.g. they can grow in their protected market until they reach a size where they can try in the rest of the world). US companies cannot do that (try to build a US smartphone manufacturer and compete with Apple in the US, just for fun).

But in those very rare situations where US companies get competition (and that will happen more and more from China), and those US companies suddenly find themselves in the weaker position, the VERY FIRST thing they want is more regulations.

"When I win, that's because I am the best. When I lose, that's because the rules are against me". You think Europe sucks because their tech companies lose against the US? Have fun comparing the US to China then :-).

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