Our company is teamed up with another big defense contractor on a project.  This appears to be a standard operating procedure for the DOD: hire multiple vendors bidding on a project and make them work together.

The project is mostly software.  So, it stands to reason that one team might provide re-usable widgets that the other should re-use.  The emphasis on “should”.

One widget wraps Hibernate as to be non-usable:  All queries must by static, lazy collections are not supported, session is not exposed, etc… That type of thing.

So, the other team has to “prove” that the widget is unusable.  Our team is small.  Two people have been spending easily 50% of their time for a few weeks proving their case.  Also, need to account for unknown amounts of politicking occurring at management levels.

It’s still not settled.  I don’t think it will ever  be settled.