[Dylan16807]

> So what goes at the beginning of their list and who is going to develop and maintain the equivalent open source software?

The beginning is any SaaS that started being used in the last 2-3 years. The immediate solution might just be going back to what they had before, if the top priority is privacy.

As far as open source, the existing companies could often be contracted, but if they don't want to open up then the government can put out bids or build a team. If entire countries want to buy something, they can make a market. And that's assuming there isn't already open source software that can do the job, because there often will be.

[scarface74]

So now you want the government to “build a team” of competent software engineers and the government is going to have to compete with the private sector for talent. The average enterprise framework developer in the US costs at least 3 times as much as the average teacher.

Now on the other hand, return offers for interns at my BigTech company is around $150K. The average salary for the superintendent of schools for larger cities is $167K. Where is the government going to get the money to compete with the private sector?

[Dylan16807]

I'm pretty sure the context here was entire countries switching, not single school districts. The money is there.

[scarface74]

In the US, congressmen make $170K a year, the president makes around $400K a year. Junior developers at large tech companies can make $170K easily in year one or two. Senior developers at tech companies make $400K+. Is the government going to pay tech workers enough to compete?

[Dylan16807]

It could.

Or it can offer tens of millions of dollars for some software and see who bids.

Especially when the previous provider would probably like to get more money selling something to the government, even if they have to make changes.

The above poster was willing to pay "1% GDP" for the initial migration and for the US 200 billion dollars would pay for a lot of development work.

[scarface74]

The companies bidding for the work would also be private industry. Wasn’t the entire idea to remove private industry from government?

Do you really think the government has the competence to create software? How many decades has the US government been trying to modernize the IRS? Do you remember the original ACA website rollout?

Not only do you have to hire developers, you have to hire project managers, retrain employers, etc.

Are you going to also create data centers to create what’s available in the public cloud? You need to make those redundant across regions, are you going to force open sourcing of control plane software?

[Dylan16807]

> Wasn’t the entire idea to remove private industry from government?

I think the main idea was to remove third party data storage? With some open source? You can contract both of those out, and when it's open source the company doesn't have the same kind of leverage.

> Do you really think the government has the competence to create software?

It's not like companies are usually good at it either, so shrug.

> Are you going to also create data centers to create what’s available in the public cloud? You need to make those redundant across regions, are you going to force open sourcing of control plane software?

At that scale, datacenters are cheaper than cloud hardware. As for making the cloud software, well, billions of dollars can buy a lot. Force shouldn't be necessary.