Switzerland recently made open source mandatory for the public sector. Whether it is mandatory or not in any geography, its use ought to be something to strive for, not only to maximize reuse, but also to achieve a higher quality result in the process.
The result is that the product almost always ends up being some bespoke pile of scraps built to a years old list of requirements that only vaguely aligns to the original problem.
It's a market that requires extreme patience and a building full of lawyers, it's not something that many companies are interested in participating in directly and pretty much impossible for a open-source organization, not that they'd even want to.
[1] I've watched a company dream-up a non-existent solution just so they could sue the government for an "unfair" competition and be compensated. I almost wish the courts had forced the government go with the imaginary product just to watch the company collapse trying to deliver something they had no intention of and would not be able to actually provide.
The obvious solution here is for the town to give the open source software an initial try on their own, then include it in the requirements as a preexisting use. In any case, the bid and contract then is not for a new product but for integration instead.
I think these platforms just have a ton of features slapped together that barely function and have no thought given to UX, but they check whatever boxes their sales team need.
My city uses a similar platform. The explosion of pickleball required a scheduling system. They were able to implement that system in a few days, although it sucks, it works.
> But adapting the software to the state’s unique regulatory needs proved challenging
A good example that's not taught in CompSci, generic software is an unsolved problem.
In a school environment we contracted someone to write room booking software (A while ago, don't need a list of current solutions)
That's crazy, in an environment that's extremely similar across the worlds schools and also overlaps with non-school environments.
The "unsolved problem" has a lot of elements, bureaucratic, entropy, the value of differences.
But one thing we always see in these $100 million case studies is the government workers won't have specced it properly, so blame will fall back.
The cost is surprising but accurate much as every noob could "write it in a weekend", the fact it doesn't work is tricky.
