"Oh, I already got paid elsewhere, but let me work for free and outbid others who are doing this as their primary job" is the unstated context and it feels a tad bit smug and elitist.
Personally, I think that the goal should be to get paid while you work on open source. But, I know that its not an option for everyone.
>I use open source technologies on a daily basis, and this seemed like a great opportunity to give back a little.
If you want to contribute to open source, then please feel free to join an open source project.
Saying that about someone who wants to help out so essentially volunteers their time to help a government project, which in essence means it helps everyone, seems a bit entitled and ill-informed.
I'm sure many people want to get paid to work on open source, but it's a free market, and people will bid what they think a project is worth, and worth isn't always about monetary compensation.
Complaining about this is essentially the same as complaining about soup-kitchen volunteers. Surely there are plenty of people that would love to be paid for that job, but we have all these smug elitist volunteers doing the jobs for free.
> If you want to contribute to open source, then please feel free to join an open source project.
The people that start/work on a specific open source project have the right to ask for compensation in whatever way they like, or enforce it through their license. You have no right to speak for all open source projects.
If volunteers do just enough free programming to drive professionals out of the market, it's possible the result will be that less work gets done. I don't think soup kitchens have the same risk.
No, it is not the same thing at all. People volunteer for organizations because the organizations DO NOT have the resources to pay them because all their money goes into buying goods and what not.
When you bid $1 and work for free, you're saying I don't want the money you're willing to pay. To fail to understand this basic difference is silly.
This comparison is inaccurate – soup kitchen volunteers are not performing a complete job which is being bid for. This underbid is more analogous to if a local government center asking for bids to serve a meeting of 500 people, and a local soup kitchen bidding $1 for the contract because they are essentially giving away free food. They then end up supplying the meeting with 500 bowls of great chili, and everyone is happy.
If the soup kitchen started doing this every time the government center issued a bid, the local restaurants would never make any money from the government center. This is not to say that they would never make money. But it is legitimate for an average restaurant in the area to be worried by the soup kitchen's actions, and view it as a potential devaluer of their product.
"Why are these amateurs playing all these shows basically for free? They're stealing money from hardworking musicians!"
Some disciplines spark addicted, passionate individuals who get other benefits beyond the price. (In contrast, there aren't a lot of enthusiast janitors.) If you want to make a living and you opt to compete with abundance, you shouldn't be shocked when someone is willing to underbid.
Totally unrelated, but this is the second time recently I've seen a remark like this. And I agree entirely, but I actually know one. Guy retired, wanted to help out an underfunded school, became their janitor. Retired military so he's essentially got a (much better than) living wage for the rest of his life, the income was irrelevant. He just wanted to see the conditions for the students improved.
I don't know much about the music business, but as a layman, I don't think the two situations are comparable. I think that when a band releases free music they're thinking "I just need to put htis out for free and if my song goes viral THEN I'm going to get picked up by this huge record label, etc ,etc"
Its more of a "let me win the lottery" prayer, than any kind of volunteer type sentiment.
It IS an open source project: https://github.com/18F/calc/blob/master/LICENSE.md
Not seeing a big difference between that and "Oh, I already make enough at my day job, now let me produce FOSS that competes with commercial software which are some people's primary job."
Not necessarily, this may be also a valid profit-oriented strategy. My wife worked for ca. 8 month almost for free (for lowest rate allowed by the law) to get an entry in her CV which landed her on her next real money job.
This is true for markets where there really is no other alternative than working for free. You are certainly referring to children of wealthy parents who can afford to do unpaid or low-paid internships and entry level jobs in industries like media, the arts, or sports.
When you are talking about contract development work, which exists a robust market for paid work, even if all similar gov't contracts gets done at the $1 it would not much affect someones ability to sell their skills in the private markets.
If you donate things then you're still buying it from someone, but giving it to someone that cannot afford them. So really, you're a surrogate purchaser.
The problem comes in when you're donating time (via work) to a group that can afford to pay for it, and there are people looking for work that are willing to work for the normal wages/rates that would've been paid.
If the people receiving the benefits of the work can't afford to pay, you aren't taking the work from anyone. When there's no one willing to work for the rates being offered, you aren't taking the work from anyone. But when people are willing to work for the rates offered, and you give your time for free, you are taking the work from other people.
The ethics and morality of giving is kind of complicated.
Would it be better to pay a company $500, of which $150 goes to the dev and $350 to company coffers?
Go back to your gulch, John Galt. Just because someone chooses to be altruistic does not mean you have to crap all over their altruism.
I'm lacking specific articles and lines of research, but charity seems to be better when it's establishing people on their own (teaching them a trade, providing them a global market for the goods they already produce, education, medical, etc.) than giving them a thing. We have to be careful when giving to others that we don't simultaneously diminish them. All of this is a balance, and the correct balance very much depends on the extent of the need and the existing capabilities and limitations of the people involved so no universal line can be drawn.
Maybe our economics are unethical. I mean we have right here evidence that people can be motivated by things other than money. But yeah we have to bow our heads at the pulpit of "sound economics".
Let's start excluding those who want to contribute in a different way because it undermines the religion. Maybe we should burn them at the stake?
Y'know, if the author explained it along the lines of "I wanted to have a record of government work as a foot in the door", I think it would be an easier pill to swallow for the folks bidding at reasonable prices.
However, the tone here is a little patronising if another bidder was just trying to get enough to cover the rent.
But at the end of the day, it's the way that system was set up. Hopefully 18F sees this as an opportunity to improve the auction system (secret minimum and other suggestions in the other thread), rather than a way to get cheap labour.
There is no reason this process has to devalue everyone else's work on a paid job.
Ayn frowns upon altruism, and lots of coders (heart) Ayn.
However, the tone here is a little patronising if another bidder was just trying to get enough to cover the rent.
More important, any bidder in any circumstance can be outbid by someone else and lose rent money in the process, right? To dictate any other outcome would require a depth of knowledge about the market and its bidders that no one party could possibly acquire reliably.
This line of argument would hold water if the federal government had any kinda of monopsony power on software consulting services. They do not.
The outcome of the auction happened in a way which was allowed by the parameters which defined it.
Edit: Also you took a massive leap of extrapolation on what my views were on a short paragraph. Beyond guessing a possible motivation (foot in door as government contractor), there's nothing pinning my views here on the auctioneer being a government contractor rather than private sector.
The market connected the man with free-time and an ideal vision, with a project that needed to get done.
I do, however, wholeheartedly embrace the pilot-model approach to IT procurement (i.e. MVP for government). It will help avoid those failure-prone $100M+ acquisitions that are doomed from the start, thus saving taxpayer money and allowing innovators to shine in practice, not through proposals.
Well, you don't, sometimes you just pay for overhead you don't need.
My wife works at a small 15 person non-profit - I was shocked when I heard how much they pay for IT support from a small support organization.
She asked what other choice they had, because they don't have anyone on-staff that can do it, and their old hardware needed a lot of support.
So I put together a proposal - for less than they were paying for a year of support services, they could replace all of their hardware with new hardware (including desktops, network and printer), plus move from hosted Exchange to Gmail (for another big cost savings).
I spent a weekend setting up the hardware, including automatic backups to a local fileserver plus crashplan for remote cloud backups (they had no backups at all before, just a bunch of flash drives with various bits of information).
They saved money after the first year, plus they had all new and reliable hardware. They bought a block of 40 hours of support from their IT support organization and haven't even used half of that over 2 years.
The big problem is identifying what is a good choice. If you don't know, you can't easily contract out the choice either, how do you know the contractor can or will make a good choice for you?
So the best outcome for non-technical organizations is to get lucky and know someone personally who knows what they're doing and has no ulterior motive - someone just like you. They don't really know if they know such a person. But if they get lucky and pick just the right helpful competent person to make IT decisions for them, modern technology can give them quite a lot for very little.
It's a perplexing situation.
> It will help avoid those failure-prone $100M+ acquisitions that are doomed from the start
Clearly, you don't always get what you pay for. The price is not always the value.
Is the government bound to accept the lowest bid? When bidding closes, it would make sense to review the lowest bids for noticeable differences in expected quality. If it isn't worth doing that, because expected quality is always high, and prices keep coming low one must consider that the task has become commoditised.
Most major contracts are, I think, 'Lowest bidder technically acceptable'. Which requires the bidder to meet minimum guidelines in their quality of work. So price is not the only factor, though it is a major one.
He wanted to do the work, he got what he wanted, and the US Government got the job done for just $1!
Not sure how anyone can see this but a victory for the US public.
18F is, I think, a fantastic initiative; I hope HM Government takes note - could be fantastic here in the UK too.
I think only an extremely cynical view would suggest this program isn't safe, a view in which conservatives intentionally dismantle good cost-saving government programs while leaving bad ones for the sole purpose of giving government a bad name.
Yes, I know this monetizes what used to be free in a way and maybe goes against the "spirit" of open source, but practically speaking it feels like it'd be a huge win win for the open source community and small to medium sized government projects in general.
18Fer here. The main issue here is how the Gov actually gets $ to that entity. There are lots of laws and rules that we need to obey about who we pay $ to - Gov doesn't have a ton of flexibility here. There was a reason why bidders had to be pre-registered.
That said, many of us want to continue to expand our engagement with the community. When it comes to bounty/reward style programs, the one I'm personally focused on figuring out first is a bug bounty program. Once we've figured out solutions for a bounty type program, you'll absolutely hear from us.
edited: small typo
One sample doesn't really establish a "market rate" yet, so I don't worry about the seller not being motivated by financial profit motive. Sometimes the value provided to the seller goes beyond the financial payment. 18F gets a good deal here because of the intangibles they have to offer.
If they put out more projects than the amount of work people are willing to do at the "$1 volunteer" or "$1 build my portfolio" rate, then the price should go up. How deep is this pool? I guess they will find out.
The big challenge, I think, will be if bad actors start coming in and making crazy bids and then doing sloppy work. Time will tell.
I'm excited to see how this develops.
Volunteering is not the same relationship as contracting, and carries different kinds of project risk for the client.
Judging bids using price as the sole basis is easy, and poor procurement.