Who: A Procurement Specialist with the Federal Government

Issue: Lack of more open dialog between vendors and government leads to poorer responses to RFPs from vendors. There is a tendency in government not to talk to vendors. Due to this lack of communication, FOSS solutions could be thrown out if they were part of a response. Government tends to follow a solution used in the past, when in doubt. It would be helpful to have a section in the Wiki dedicated towards how vendors can respond to RFP’s that would prevent them from getting thrown out. Also, the following article is recommended as a great reference as to communication issues with vendors: http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/procurement/memo/Myth-Busting.pdf

Issue: Procurement staff are often occupied so much with meeting rules and regulations that they have a tendency to not be careful about the bigger picture - the solution. Therefore, a constant balance needs to be met between meeting the rules while providing effective solutions. Procurement staff need more information on the right way to get FOSS tools to the public.

Issue: Terms and conditions needs to be updated for FOSS procurement. South Carolina has been developing a good set of terms and conditions that other states could use. Oregon has won an award for terms and conditions that they have developed. The standard Federal template indemnifies government entirely (no risk on Feds). But Oregon makes the terms and conditions on risk more balanced.

Issue: The zero risk indemnity provision in the Federal template, has tried to been adopted by State governments with adverse effects. Experienced contractors will choose not to respond to RFPs if they know they will be burdened with the full risk. Therefore, inexperienced vendors willing to take the risk will win the bid, and because of their inexperience, they do a poor job performing on the contract.

Observation: In this Federal agency, the downloading and deploying of open source software does not trigger procurement, and to the best of this interviewee’s knowledge, operations support of deployed software is not presently an issue or hurdle to deploying open source software.