Re: Big IT

[DavidR5317]

Wayne:

<<It's interesting to look at recent actions the German government took to
encourage an open source alternative to Microsoft Exchange.� They
provided contracts to three commercial companies to develop the
product.� These companies used existing open source tools and created a
new KDE based project and are ready to release their Exchange
replacement into testing this year!� This development took less than a year!>>

Do you know how much was spent on the development with each of these companies?  Why three companies?  Were they each developing different components of the overall solution or was this an attempt to foster competition by having them compete to develop the winning solution that would then be deployed?
In terms of size of the project do you know how many function points were being developed?  What amount of testing of the solution is being done?  Thanks

DaveR