They say that functional (and by all accounts fantastic) code was delivered for the winning $1 bid, and then they claim that the experiment was a success. But was it really? Is a $1 winning bid in the spirit of this? Couldn't someone who just wants to pad their resume submit $1 bids for everything, thereby "winning" 100% of the time and depriving of actual income these legitimate businesses who might count on these contracts for survival?
I'm not making a judgment either way, but allowing a $1 bid seems... strange. Are there other considerations that go into the "success" of the platform, or success merely defined by the delivery of functional code for the price of the winning bid?
Why is this a question or a problem at all? If a business requires overpriced contracts to survive... then they should die, right? It's like photography. Photogs were complaining about hobbyists willing to enter the market for free. How Windows shipped with free photos from non-professionals, and how that hurts them. ... So what? If your work is something someone will do for fun, fame, etc. then why should you be paid for it?
So long they have QC controls in place, it sounds great. In fact, they should consider allowing the price to go negative as it's clear people are willing to _pay_ to do this work.
I'm the author of the blog post, but the claim of success is based on a number of factors other than the $1.
As we note re the $1:
> "This unexpected development will no doubt force us to rethink some of our assumptions about the reverse-auction model."
Also, the success is borne out of the data:
> "Given these statistics, we think it’s fair to say that there is a market for open-source micro-purchasing, though we obviously will need to spend some time and effort refining our methods.
The success is in validation of the idea, not the actual result in this case. That said, the result is new, functional open-source software for the American public. So that's still a pretty good outcome.
From the post, it really seems like this was an experiment - and they seemed to have learned a fair bit from it. I'm not sure I'd take this single $1 result and say that'll be typical in the future.
I agree that $1 can be strange, and some can perceive it as unfair. But there are a lot of business models, where the goal is to get a foot in the door, before monetizing in the future (freemium comes to mind). And if it financially doesn't make sense, I'm doubtful that at scale everyone will be bidding $1 and providing great code.
Hopefully, though, the system won't make it hard for smaller development firms, which may struggle most with concessionary pricing.
I think the main problem is that while the pr is fantastic, with doing this for free (actually worse than free, the single dollar incurs the overhead of payment, taxes etc - without actually providing any of the benefits of payment) - they've not successfully tried out making a commercial market place. They've found a way to solicit free work.
While certainly interesting in its own right (how can we get random people to contribute solid open source modules to government IT projects?) - this isn't actually a success for growing a marketplace where contractors can participate and make money from these projects. Unless they can figure out something to fix the pricing. Perhaps having 10.000 such projects available would lead to most of them having a more real competition for "for profit" bids. Or maybe it would just turn into some kind of Amazon Turk dystopia with desperate people contributing code that takes much more time evaluating than it would take to write a proper solution.
I'm really exited this went so well (They did it; the winning bid provided a great solution) -- it will be interesting to see where this ends up going (and how they plan on handling support and project management as/if this model picks up steam).
If the government is getting better code and paying less than it otherwise would, I call that doubly a win. I don't think there's anything "illegitimate" about doing it for $1 - if people consider the resume padding to be worth doing the work for, why not let them?
Based on the parameters of the experiment, it was a success. Also, we learned things! The next experiment will look a little different. Iterate, improve.
I think what the parent means to say is: "The lower the bid ceteris paribus (all else being equal) [0], the better." In this particular case, the article states: "Not only did Brendan Sudol meet the requirements of loading the data, the new code had 100 percent test coverage, an A grade from Code Climate, and included some new functionality to boot."
This who depend on contracts for their survival have many many other potential clients who make money through profit rather than taxation. I'm fine with solving tragedies of the commons more cheaply.
If there are so many people willing to donate quality code that there's nothing left for legitimate businesses, maybe those businesses are doomed to failure?
I'm not making a judgment either way, but allowing a $1 bid seems... strange. Are there other considerations that go into the "success" of the platform, or success merely defined by the delivery of functional code for the price of the winning bid?