The Four Stages Of Life

bad_planning != open_source_is_bad

Well, even though I am not particularly passionate about my current job, I also take solace from the fact that at I am not one of the engineers who are bravely firefighting the eNaTis chaos that appears to me both as bad planning and an apparent lack of foresight. eNaTis is the government's ambitious plan to replace the previously inefficient and severely technically limited 14 year-old National Traffic Information System.(NaTIS).

While the government's motivation to replace the old system is both sound and logical, I think the way the roll out was planned and implemented was so rush-rush and ambitious that eNaTis' current unstableness not only irritates the public but the also seems to overshadow its intended initial benefits. eNatis was rolled out in provinces on a small scale in December 2006 then a National full-out national roll out performed on the 17th of April.

The pilot roll-out was marred by performance problems in that pilot phase, which clearly do not seem to had been properly resolved before the go-live date. Service delivery has obviously been severely affected. Also affected has been the Retail Motor Industry as they have reported lost in sales in the April/May period due to eNaTIs' erratic downtime. An unlikely casualty has been open source software, as eNatis is reported to have been implemented in Java, Redhat Linux and Jasper Reports (all open source projects).

Open source software has unfortunately become a casualty because of the perception that what is free can certainly not be reliable, hence cynics are quick to blame open source projects than the apparent failure in project planning and incremental piloting from the side of the government's and the eNatis developer.There are many successful open source projects: Google.com, Amazon.com, DaimlerChrysler, DreamWorks, US Department of Defense, to mention a few. It is both ill-informed and malicious to attribute the failure of badly planned project to the use of open source software.

Solidarity.