And this is a problem. Lowest-bidder-wins always creates a race to the bottom.
At least in the province of Venice, there was a complicated set of rules to pick between bidders of public contractors - so the law is certainly not universal in this regard.
If I recall correctly, it was based on percentiles instead of taking just the lowest bidder in an attempt to avoid companies racing to the bottom.
This in turn created a system where winning ad these bids was mostly by chance, and unsurprisingly was found to be rigged several times. But I digress...
In several places where I lived the public transport road service was subcontracted to the lowest-bidding private company of the region.
This in turn creates this shitty illusion of "public" service that nobody wants to use, because:
- it's unreliable (delays and strikes are common)
- short working hours
- poorly planned (or no) interconnections with other public services
- abusive service costs to recoup the costs
Even factoring all expenses of a car, several bus connections I was forced to take in the past where in the order of 5-6 times the total cost of car ownership. This doesn't even include the grave annoyances I listed above.
Pretty much any city in EU has now some forms of traffic restriction policies. The same is true for where I live as well.
The issue is not really the restriction, but the lack of alternatives. Very few cities have a decent metro zone: these cities are the only ones where I see no objections to stricter traffic policies.
Most cities are only served by public _road_ transport services. This doesn't have the same level of service, by a long shot. There's a huge, _huge_ difference between having to plan your move in 1hr intervals and just hop on a platform having to wait no longer than 10 minutes. Not to mention the cost, inevitable delays due to traffic, shorter service hours and so on.
I would ban all cars tomorrow and sell mine too if I could get anywhere in a metro. Reality is, this is only feasible for very few selected places.
The governments here should make public transport massively better first. The reality is that they just enforce restrictions and provide no alternatives. What do you do then?
In my limited experience, I'm not sure it's an advantage.
You do get to break the ice faster during interviews and contacting new clients. But it can easily backfire as well: people will ask why "project X" is not up to their coding standards, why you didn't contribute to "X" and/or why "X" has not been fixed yet.
Not everybody seem to grasp this notion that these might not be professional products.
I often discuss with my friends that do not have any public projects to show off during interviews. It really doesn't seem to affect the outcome, unless the company in itself is interested in one of your projects (which is pretty rare considering the breadth of OSS).
This has been discussed before and it has been true for me as well. I don't have a large, super-popular package I maintain, but several lesser known ones, some of which I wrote, and several of which I just adopted and passively became a maintainer over time.
At some point the pressure from the community made me pass the magical threshold between fun/useful/rewarding and downright chore.
It has permanently changed my perception of OSS management, to the point that I stopped releasing further projects, no matter how small, simply due to the work that these entail.
Just look at the discussions you find here monthly about being "a good author/maintainer/leader", where most expect full documentation, professional landing pages, useless code of conduct, and so on... BESIDES the project itself. You'll be criticized irregardless.
I have deep respect for the maintainers of popular OSS projects because of the amount of s*it they must take. I know I wouldn't do it for free at these scales. I also wouldn't do it besides another job since it is so demanding.
At least in the province of Venice, there was a complicated set of rules to pick between bidders of public contractors - so the law is certainly not universal in this regard.
If I recall correctly, it was based on percentiles instead of taking just the lowest bidder in an attempt to avoid companies racing to the bottom.
This in turn created a system where winning ad these bids was mostly by chance, and unsurprisingly was found to be rigged several times. But I digress...