Senate dishes out second helping of SAMOSA to kill costly software licenses

Sloppy government software licensing practices are back on the menu in the US Senate.  The Strengthening Agency Management and Oversight of Software Assets (SAMOSA - yes, seriously) Act was reintroduced in the Senate yesterday by Senator Gary Peters (D-MI) following the reintroduction of a functionally identical bill in the …

[veti]

Bipartisan bill, therefore no grandstanding.

And no apparent pork.

That's a recipe for the lowest priority you can get, right there.

[Anonymous Coward]

It beggars belief that it’s even a thing and wasn’t sorted 20+ years ago, with a single Federal Price for everything, leveraging hard procurement, volume discounts across hardware, software, licensing, cloud, professional day rates etc. (note the *procurement entity is *NOT* a profit centre slurping up all the volume rebates).

I guess that’s viewed as communist and not fiscally (small c) conservative.

UK, EU, Australia etc are little better.

< *Hello Granada Purchasing>

[MachDiamond]

"Bipartisan bill, therefore no grandstanding.

And no apparent pork.

That's a recipe for the lowest priority you can get, right there."

It could still be a pointless exercise with no benefit. More headcount, certainly. There will need to be a department of software registration tracking with it's own building and management.

[MachDiamond]

6 or a half dozen

How much money will it cost to keep a tighter insight into unused licenses? Will it be more than what the licenses would cost?

QSC, a company that make audio electronics figured out that keeping an accurate inventory of small inexpensive parts was a waste of money. Vendors are required to make site visits to the factory and keep bins of screws, etc topped up and just bill for the parts. The company knows how many are going into products and can roughly estimate how many get dropped on the floor or are no good and just tossed. As long as a vendor isn't trying to bill for too much more than the estimates, they'll be fine. The parts bin stays filled so there's no shortages that halt production. The reason they did this was not just salaries to have people counting parts that are 5 to the penny, but those people needed a chair desk, toilet paper, benefits, coffee, etc. There was no way all of that extra cost made up for a very accurate inventory count. I used a modified version of that where we calculated the minimums we needed to have on hand based on lead times. We'd order something like 25k eyelets and bag them up in 1,000 lot sealed bags for inventory. The bin would tell anybody that once it was down to X bags to notify me we were getting low. If I need to, I could look in the bin, count the unopened bags and take a guess at what was in the tray from an opened bag as a quick check 2-3 times each year for tax and insurance reasons. When I first started, I was a stickler for an accurate inventory and learned not to sweat the little stuff so I could have the time to keep tighter control over the expensive parts and the long lead time items.

TL:DR, unless it's too far out of whack, it's cheaper to not worry about it.