I've long talked about public service IT procurement (globally but esp in NZ) with derision, especially towards the 'priorities and values' of the decision makers. I've been saying they have made mostly very bad decisions for decades & I believe the constant stream of media we hear about bungled implementations, budget blowouts, agency heads misleading Ministers, and the generally woeful state of pub-serv tech supports my assertions. I think I understand what the decision makers got wrong. 1/n
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Nope. The Big Four are looking at global revenue streams. Their biggest customers are probably gov'ts... but their biggest sources of business are, in the IT space, Big Tech. So it's in their interest to always 'put their finger on the scale' to ensure Big Tech wins any procurement process... because it brings them the most new business. It's a mutual back slapping exercise. It's pretty much out in the open, but relies on 'low level' lack of ethics across lots of corporations. 🤔 Plausible?
3/n
Of course! KPIs must be fulfilled. Shareholder value doesn't maximise itself! If it doesn't get you arrested, it's 'good practise' in the dog-eat-dog mega multinational melee. So all the 'adjacent' IT industries, like the IT media, swan over the already mass marketed products of Big Tech, gushing over the new Gen AI release of Windows (now w/ 5 copilots! Yay) 🙄 or whatever Big Tech have vomited up now and desperately want to flog to the largely uninformed market. So the question is...
4/n
Where do public service decision makers gain the knowledge and insight they use to make procurement decisions? Few of them are actual IT practitioners. I'm sure most are quite dedicated to their roles & responsibilities though. So they read what they think is relevant. They go to conferences, *all* sponsored by Big Tech. They ask the Big Four. They ask Big Tech affiliate Gartner what's important. In short they develop an entirely seamless, rosy view of the world, with great swag & muffins.
5/n
That's 100% skewed in a pro-capital direction. It - at best - damns with faint praise anything that doesn't have 'big capital' behind it. Because how're Big Tech or the Big Four or the IT Media supposed to make money off of it? It's in their *every* commercial interest to stifle it and stick to the gravy train. Here in NZ, we see it *every Thursday* on RNZ 9toNoon's 'tech segment' (sorry @billbennett) - Big Tech is news, because it's all that people think of when they think of tech. But...
5/n
...but. The internet is built on digital technologies from the time when software was for 'hackers' (in the playful, good sense, not the current media reframing) & the fork between capital & community in the software world. That fork resulted in two parallel universes. The Big Tech/Big Four/IT Media one, and the libre/open source one. The former has capital, the latter just has dedicated, talented people, largely uncompromised by greed, having fun scratching their own itches.
6/n
It turns out that the itches libre developer communities have scratched for the past few decades are ones that affect most people. They've resulted in some seriously powerful, but tragically under appreciated digital artefacts. The lack of capital = ~zero marketing. But the communities of interest are tight & get a LOT done. When, with emergence of Trump, the EU realised how its entire sovereignty was dictated by US Big Tech (who control *all* their information, and how they work with it)...
7/n
... there was panic. Understandably. After all, many of us had only been warning them for a few decades. But when the EU scrambled to find an alternative to US Big Tech... the *only* viable options they found were locally developed libre/open source systems. The EuroStack is essentially a collection of them stitched together. It looks very serviceable. Perhaps better than the incumbents' products. That's because unlike for corps, *the incentives* for libre software are *100% user-aligned*.
8/n
That's because the libre customer is the user is the developer. 100% aligned. For Big Tech, the developer works for the customer - the shareholder. The user is an afterthought. With monopolies, the alignment gets worse - existing users become the enemy when something 'new' is released. They need to be made to 'upgrade' even if they don't want to. 0% alignment.
The coup de grace against any non-capitalist procurement by NZ gov't was our membership of the CPTPPA.
9/n
I wrote about that yesterday: https://mastodon.nzoss.nz/@lightweight/117551373432104733
Note that what I say about 'Big Tech' incentives apply to all proprietary software, because, once purchased, the vendor has effective monopoly for that software over the purchaser. The power balance is the same.
The EU has finally, in 2020, produced this report: https://euipo.europa.eu/tunnel-web/secure/webdav/guest/document_library/observatory/documents/reports/2020_Open_Source_software/2020_OSS_Full_EN.pdf in which they belatedly recognise the value of libre software to the EU. Let's see if they manage to push back the Big Tech/Four lobbyists now. 🤞🏻
10/n
And, one has to wonder, when will Aotearoa NZ have its own awakening to how badly it's been exploited by foreign mega IT corporations (and even some smaller ones in specialised areas), reinforced at every turn by the Big Four and IT Media, and under the sword of Damocles formed by the CPTPPA's ISDS clauses.
When will we realise our local capability & the economies of scale that, for example, come from building a specific *libre* solution for, say...
11/n
...local gov't, public libraries, public education, or public health (yes, high profile overpriced bus ticketing system, I'm thinking of you, too!) or whatever, developed by our very capable local industry under a 'copyleft' license (this is a 100% requirement)... piloting it... and if it works... rolling it out to the rest of the country on a cost-recovery basis rather than a foreign corporate profit orgy basis like usual! What's more the software belongs to us. And we can share it.
12/n
Hear me out: the problem is that public servants (and in fact most people) don't view capitalism as a conspiracy. They don't view corporations as its totally committed agents. They believe that one corporation can credibly assess the value of work that another corporation proposes to gov't - e.g. a 'feasibility study' or a 'ROI report' or 'cost-benefit analysis' provided by one of the 'Big Four'. You'd think they're 'neutral' or maybe on the gov't's side, it the gov't is paying them, right? 2/n