Having worked along side a number of government projects, I can confidently say that all the projects based on "off the shelf" products end up becoming vastly more expensive because you usually end up with hugely expensive support contracts with BT / IBM / MS / Oracle / etc and often the solutions need some bespoke tuning to work the way needed, so you add on expensive consultancy costs to have the software adapted to fit.
Where as developing stuff in house means that you're employing significantly cheaper labour (namely, the rubbish salaries that most get in the public sector vs the private sector) and as a bonus the cost is more likely going to stay within the UK (ie you're not paying multinational companies nor their overseas consultants (Oracle was particularly bad for this as they dumped our stuff in a US data centre and our support contacts were all living somewhere in eastern Europe. So very little - if anything - provided was UK based).
Sadly our government doesn't seem to understand about doing anything in between - or at least not that I observed when I used to work there. It was either entirely bespoke or entirely bought, developed and set up by some overpriced conglomerate (or worse yet, outsourced completely). So going by the trends that I've witnessed, I'd rather the technology playgrounds just so long as they remain developed in house.
Maybe. I don't know how huge that project is. Maybe technologies that have been chosen are the best for the tasks at hand. Maybe some of those technologies are only minor part, not in critical area, maybe it is some technology research project. Maybe it is kind of managerial pride "let's write how many lines our source code contains". As well, I guess, you don't assume that software developers should learn new technologies on their own time (while I personally love to do that).
That's a silly argument. I'd rather not be pissing an estimated £6400+maintenance up the wall on a project which could have been realised with off the shelf technology.
Just because the organisation uses open-source software doesn't excuse them from public and professional scrutiny.
An MP spending £1645 on a duck house under expenses got a lot more attention than this little bit of waste. Just redressing the balance.
Anything can be realised with off-the-shelf technology plus time. Your posited solution further down the page would also have involved work in setting up the pool configuration and switching, so let's not pretend that it comes at zero cost.
It will come with proportionately less cost initially and over time though which is the issue.
Efficiency is a major problem in government. Government should have a low financial impact on society where possible. A government entering a market with an already solved problem is wasteful at best. If they'd contributed time to Nginx or mod_proxy then they would have a net positive social effect.
But they didn't. They built an inferior product at great cost to the taxpayer.
A government entering a market with an already solved problem is wasteful at best. If they'd contributed time to Nginx or mod_proxy then they would have a net positive social effect.
Is this some sort of Markov-chained free-market/El-Reg-at-its-most-prolix/libertarian experiment in satire? Well played!
That made me laugh and I've upvoted you for that, but no, it's serious.
Various governments are already throwing money at Open Document Foundation (France, Germany come to mind) to support LibreOffice so why shouldn't we throw a few quid at nginx/apache?
Where as developing stuff in house means that you're employing significantly cheaper labour (namely, the rubbish salaries that most get in the public sector vs the private sector) and as a bonus the cost is more likely going to stay within the UK (ie you're not paying multinational companies nor their overseas consultants (Oracle was particularly bad for this as they dumped our stuff in a US data centre and our support contacts were all living somewhere in eastern Europe. So very little - if anything - provided was UK based).
Sadly our government doesn't seem to understand about doing anything in between - or at least not that I observed when I used to work there. It was either entirely bespoke or entirely bought, developed and set up by some overpriced conglomerate (or worse yet, outsourced completely). So going by the trends that I've witnessed, I'd rather the technology playgrounds just so long as they remain developed in house.