Sure I think something like Cover Oregon could be an open-source project. The problem is the need for expert management of the project, very much the issue in Oregon: relying on Oracle to manage the project turned out to be an expensive mistake.
Plenty of open source talent in Oregon. I imagine there'd be many volunteers for a big DB/web project. It should be possible to do, after all, would Cover Oregon be more complex than Firefox or the Linux kernel?
In theory, not be all that difficult to hire a good project management team, set up the framework and let contributors work on it. Probably get done much quicker and of course, at way less cost.
Of course, doing that is taking a risk which is routinely avoided by timid bureaucrats and enterprises. Though the lesson of Oregon's experience is there to be learned--it shows the far bigger risks of doing things the same old way.
You can hire private corporations and even pay large sums of money (like 1/100th of this is a very big sum) with a proviso that all the code be published under some Free license. This is not advocating self-organizing cat herding with multiple entities donating developer time.
Hire bigco, publish what they give you so the neighbours can also use it and you're not stuck with bigco for support.
ie you can also fire bigco if they suck once you hired them.
An interesting idea, a kind of gradually-open model of participation. Could work if the source or (selected part of it) is incrementally released from time to time, so at least there's opportunity for open participation if in a more structured manner. Ultimately, the entire source is made available, but by then it works according to specs and has been constructed sanely.
Maybe my interpretation of your idea wouldn't work exactly as you has in mind, but I see your point, that maintaining greater control of the development process would likely lead to a more coherent and predictable product that functions in accordance with carefully designed specs.
Among flies in the ointment is the necessity for such a highly principled and skilled steering group to manage the effort with the requisite wisdom around scheduling releases and titrating the level of community involvement. The level of talent it implies is likely in short supply.
That said, an admiral proposal, distinctly possible, even revolutionary. To quote Spinoza, "all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare".
No. I'm not being clear.
Hire eg IBM global services to build you the solution. In the contract it states clearly, part of the deliverable is the source code that will be published under xyz license. Whether you hire IBM, Oracle, Accenture etc or do something a lot less moronic you insist on source and insist on being assigned the copyright to it and you publish it. Every time. Always.
That's the step forward I am suggesting. Not the linux kernel model of development. If such a thing arose for particular projects, great. But it's not a requirement nor the goal.
Plenty of open source talent in Oregon. I imagine there'd be many volunteers for a big DB/web project. It should be possible to do, after all, would Cover Oregon be more complex than Firefox or the Linux kernel?
In theory, not be all that difficult to hire a good project management team, set up the framework and let contributors work on it. Probably get done much quicker and of course, at way less cost.
Of course, doing that is taking a risk which is routinely avoided by timid bureaucrats and enterprises. Though the lesson of Oregon's experience is there to be learned--it shows the far bigger risks of doing things the same old way.