[bsder]

While I love the David vs Goliath here, I'm going to point out the thing that open source folks just love to fluff over:

Who is going to maintain that app over time?

Maintenance sucks and is expensive.

I'm going through this right now with a security system for a non-profit. The old system is open source and works--but it's 10 years dead.

So, they'd like to add these couple features. Who is going to develop that? Who is going to pay for that? What happens 10 years from now?

So, they can pay money for a commercial solution which is "Somebody Else's Problem(tm)" or they can go with a bespoke system that becomes their problem.

Maintenance is a cost that open source never accounts for.

[lucb1e]

Proprietary route:

input: 5+ years and 100 million dollars

output: crappy system

maintenance: still necessary, hire anyone but probably the expensive guys from before

The route that these parents demonstrated:

input: a few months and presumably a whole lot less money

output: something that seems to be well-liked

maintenance: still necessary, hire anyone

Regardless of "but who's going to maintain it", the benefits should be clear here. People don't work on open source code because they get paid to and shrug when they do something useless or even detrimental just because the boss says so. They work on it for a passion. Now if you hire a company to write the open source code, you kind of lose that benefit, but if the development is out in the open, the public can at least keep track of it and say "but this doesn't make sense" or "let's get a working system before we spend another 4 years over-engineering and bloating this". This open model is how the corona tracker was developed in the Netherlands and it worked super well. The question is now whether the government will dare to do it again with the next IT project.

[ryukafalz]

> maintenance: still necessary, hire anyone but probably the expensive guys from before

Don't forget: sometimes the copyright is still owned by the contractor that developed it, at which point the options are only "hire the expensive guys from before." Want to make a change and the vendor can't/won't? Oops, guess you're starting over from scratch! Or you don't make the change you wanted to and live with it as-is.

[bsder]

> Regardless of "but who's going to maintain it", the benefits should be clear here.

Are they clear?

Or is this the "Chrysler Comprehensive Compensation System" all over again? aka the gigantic disaster that somehow spawned the Extreme Programming "experts" and implemented the easy 80% while missing the really hard 80% (yes, that totals to 160% intentionally).

It's really easy to produce something that majority like but doesn't get even basic use cases. For example, let's start with some simple stuff:

- Does it meet GDPR guidelines?

- Does it meet accessibility guidelines?

- Does it meet security guidelines for protection of personal information of minors? (Apparently the original government software completely blew this off. As always.)

As I have pointed out previously on HN, that adds a bunch of cost to government software that MUST be paid if the software is part of government functionality.

I can whip out a single page app in a hurry. Ask me to comply with those issues and I'm going to have to spend a lot more time on things.

Don't get me wrong. Big IT projects like these always become boondoggles. However, everybody always simply gives the open source project the benefit of the doubt at being "better" when it probably just blows off a lot of functionality.

Government CRUD applications have to be able to handle the majority while still allowing the 0.1% to be handled.

[stale2002]

> Are they clear?

Yes they are. The benefits are clear, because apparently a whole bunch of users got together a spent a bunch of effort building something that solve real problems that they themselves were having.

> everybody always simply gives the open source project the benefit of the doubt at being "better" when it probably just blows off a lot of functionality.

If people are using it, and spent a bunch of time and effort to solve their problems, then almost by definition, it is solving a problem that they were having.

So yes, we can just assume that it is better in some ways. If a bunch of people are using it, then almost by definition, it is providing value to some people.

[detaro]

Of course open source also needs maintenance, but maintenance isn't suddenly cheaper because you bought a big commercial solution. The difference is that for open-source, you are not reliant on the original provider to maintain it, but can pick from a large range of open-source dev shops and consultancies to help as long as the size of the system is tractable. (or if it's a big thing, hire your own people and bring in external support as needed)

[bsder]

For someone without expertise, there is no difference between paying money to a proprietary company and paying money to an open source developer.

In fact, open source is almost always worse--the proprietary company can at least generally demonstrate that they can do what they say.

And, for contracts like these, the end customer generally gets the source anyway. So, to the end customer, there really is no difference.

And this is before we get into the whole "Whose budget holds the money for that maintenance over time?" political football. A lot of government contracting is about transferring uncertain future payments into certain present payments. And someone will try to kill that budget at some point.

I love open source. But open source software almost always fails hard when the subject isn't relevant to software programming.

[oscardssmith]

What about blender, vlc, and Firefox?

[bsder]

Firefox and Blender have significant commercial investment behind them to keep them maintained. And they both started out as proprietary.

VLC I don't know about.

The fact that there are so few successful, non-programming examples exactly demonstrates the point.

[astrange]

VLC is mostly based on ffmpeg which didn't have much public commercial sponsorship for years, until the post-YouTube era, where there was some sponsorship from Google but mostly just a lot more small and large closed-source developers releasing crappy "video converter programs" and not crediting it.

It instead was mostly developed by a schizophrenic Austrian math genius in his free time from not being regularly employed, plus some other grad student types.

[detaro]

Blender has significant investment because users pay developers for its maintenance, yes.

[viraptor]

> Who is going to maintain that app over time?

This is not a "current proprietary system" vs "open system maintained by volunteers". They can basically adopt the open system which is better and pay whoever they want the same account of money to maintain it. They just need to shift which system is being maintained. (And may even save money that way)

[mannerheim]

Yes, free software projects can stop being maintained. But proprietary products can go out of business. Or they might shut the service down (witness the Google Graveyard). At least with free software you can hire someone else to maintain it if it stops being maintained.