Comment by fc417fc802
3 days ago
I think that's true for widgets but it becomes much more opaque when it comes to digital services, particularly those that handle sensitive information. Sure there's govcloud and fedramp these days but if the US federal government had chosen to build that hardware out in house I think that would have been a reasonable decision. It's similar to private versus in house security personnel where there are arguments in favor of both.
The real case here is software. The government can license it instead of writing it, but what it should actually do is buy it and release it into the public domain instead of licensing it. Which still doesn't require them to write it themselves, but in >90% of the cases they need software, they should be causing what they use to be in the public domain, and commissioning new code to release whenever the incumbents won't do it for less than the cost of writing new.