I have some hope that counties and states will end up making different contracts with different companies at different times, and that interoperability will be a very late afterthought just like it is in the rest of the proprietary software world, leaving various jurisdictions with many uncoordinated and incompatible databases and applications. Every proprietary software maker does the same thing, they don’t make their data system open or accessible unless some outside pressure forces it.

Also some states and counties are putting bans or other regulatory restrictions in place, which will help add to the general confusion and compatibility issues.

For those of you working in tech fields that may be related, now is the time to take all of the lessons you’ve learned about how bad, selfish proprietary software is made, all the annoyances and roadblocks you’ve run into over the years trying to make disparate bits of technology work together, and start implementing those as features. If someone questions it, tell them it’s necessary to protect company intellectual property. Make it clunky.