[detaro]

Of course open source also needs maintenance, but maintenance isn't suddenly cheaper because you bought a big commercial solution. The difference is that for open-source, you are not reliant on the original provider to maintain it, but can pick from a large range of open-source dev shops and consultancies to help as long as the size of the system is tractable. (or if it's a big thing, hire your own people and bring in external support as needed)

[bsder]

For someone without expertise, there is no difference between paying money to a proprietary company and paying money to an open source developer.

In fact, open source is almost always worse--the proprietary company can at least generally demonstrate that they can do what they say.

And, for contracts like these, the end customer generally gets the source anyway. So, to the end customer, there really is no difference.

And this is before we get into the whole "Whose budget holds the money for that maintenance over time?" political football. A lot of government contracting is about transferring uncertain future payments into certain present payments. And someone will try to kill that budget at some point.

I love open source. But open source software almost always fails hard when the subject isn't relevant to software programming.

[oscardssmith]

What about blender, vlc, and Firefox?

[bsder]

Firefox and Blender have significant commercial investment behind them to keep them maintained. And they both started out as proprietary.

VLC I don't know about.

The fact that there are so few successful, non-programming examples exactly demonstrates the point.

[astrange]

VLC is mostly based on ffmpeg which didn't have much public commercial sponsorship for years, until the post-YouTube era, where there was some sponsorship from Google but mostly just a lot more small and large closed-source developers releasing crappy "video converter programs" and not crediting it.

It instead was mostly developed by a schizophrenic Austrian math genius in his free time from not being regularly employed, plus some other grad student types.

[detaro]

Blender has significant investment because users pay developers for its maintenance, yes.