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> But a lot of the US is not like this-- school districts, municipal and county government, etc would do pretty poorly to follow some parts of these guidelines, and quite well served to follow others.

True - I think the playbook is specifically oriented to state government folks - not as much municipal or county.

> I've too often seen someone take a document like this to justify maintaining a custom built municipal accounting system

Please feel free to submit a PR to help make that clearer! I would only say that some COTS solutions can also end up in a "no one knows how to maintain this" after enough custom code has been added.



In general, I think there should be a high burden for most folks on whether custom code should be permitted in these cases. I have absolutely seen the same, and this almost always comes after someone makes a reasonable decision to go with COTS, followed by new folks in the role abandoning that rationale for that commitment and companies not knowing how to tell customers "no" or even more importantly "We don't solve that problem, but we're happy to support ways for our system to work with something you procure or build that _does_ solve that problem."


Worse, nobody knows how to maintain it and the vendor is gone and took the source with them.


This happens. I've also seen cases where the vendor, by contract, does not permit government staff outside of 1-2 people from viewing the source code.




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