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Comment by peripetylabs | Hacker News Reader

You would think these folks could write their own OS for that kind of money.

I think its a good idea, except there is some ass-backwards rules to stop this; OMB Circular A-130. The Senate also added to the NDAA 2013 to ensure a "less expensive" commercial software is used.

"The bill indicates that Accumulo may violate OMB Circular A-130, a government policy that bars agencies from building software if it’s less expensive to use commercial software that’s already available. And according to one congressional staffer who worked on the bill, this is indeed the case. He asked that his name not be used in this story, as he’s not authorized to speak with the press." http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/07/nsa-accumulo-go...

Ah, why am I still surprised... When you can't compete on technical merit, legislate away the competition!

Exactly. It's not they couldn't make requirements unable to be fulfilled by commercial software. It's that Senators and Congressman start getting complaints from the lobbyists representing the competition, and get legislation passed to make it go away.

It is rare that an entity can't write requirements in such a way that no "Commercial Software" full fills them. However in most cases it is cheaper to use COTS software for almost everything. There are very few places in the DoD that have the core competency of writing software. Even in corporate environments how many places write their own software? Most bring in vendors for everything.

Or hell: pay a team of 6,170 developers $100,000 for a year to make all their apps run beautifully under WINE and/or port the source to Linux outright.

Do you have an idea of how much an IT project costs a Government? The firearm registry in Canada, a country much smaller than the US and with a lot less firearms, costs 66M a year http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Firearms_Registry

I don't see where the big deal is. MS is an American company that employs a lot of people. That money will come back to the government in taxes and spending someday.

That sounds incredibly expensive. I think these companies just price software that way because they don't get a lot of contracts through out the year, if they make only custom software for governments, and they need to make every license very expensive to survive. Then the government pays up, because what the hell - it's not really their money.

So I don't think the prices these companies are asking from governments is in any way related to development time of the software, or even with maintenance time. I think it's mostly based on how much the government is willing to pay.

And I disagree with your last remark, too. By that logic the government can just spend it on anything and as much as they want. They need to be efficient with the money, to be able to make or sustain multiple projects at once. Otherwise they'll have to raise taxes, fire people from other programs, or they wouldn't start new needed projects.

The major problem with Government contracts, and often part of the reason the costs seem insane, is that these are about as established/regimented and non-technical an environment as you can imagine.

Small companies founded+run by agile hackers struggle to navigate their way to contracts under those circumstances. Or at least that's what I've seen from reading about efforts to encourage it in the UK.

In my last remark I am not entirely right but you get the idea. Microsoft employs almost 100 000 individuals and most of them are US taxpayers. If you give them a big contract, it's good for the company, good for jobs in the US and it stimulates the economy in some way. Of course that money doesn't come back automatically the next day. But consider an alternative. Let's say that they get a contract with Samsung instead, the biggest korean company. Let's assume we had the means to follow the flow of money, how much of that money that goes to Korea will return to the US? One can start thinking about this for a long time. It's easier to assume that money spent on Microsoft = jobs and salaries and other things = taxes for govt.

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