[breck]

We should outlaw government spending on closed source, non public domain software. That would create a huge market for open source companies to thrive. Would be a win win for everyone (except the current closed vendors who provide government with crap software and get sucker taxpayers to foot the bill).

[shagie]

The issue is not "Microsoft Office vs Libre office" but rather "how much does it cost to necessary up to the support necessary for the government office in order to support Libre office?"

Things like "ok, we can't use one drive - need a different tool," "can't use Sharepoint, need to use a different tool," and so on.

The market is there. RHEL and similar are well established.

In order to make this a "we should do this" either government IT funding needs to be significantly increased (that is difficult in the current political climate in most places) or the support offerings and staff needed for the average user (using Windows, Sharepoint, Word, Excel, Teams, and Project) needs to be competitive with the pricing that Microsoft offers.

That should be "simple" - make a company that offers the same level of support as Microsoft does for a packaged suite of software that includes easy installations, appropriately locked down desktops, call center, and so on.

And if that can't be found at the same price that Microsoft offers - then we return to the "increase government funding."

Saying "we should outlaw government spending on closed source" misses a lot of the tools out there that are needed to keep things running. Is there a FOSS (with support contracts for the stack) alternative to Cerner or Epic? SAP? ArcGIS? And that's not even getting deep at all into the niche SaaS tools that some pieces use for specific problems.

The market is there and state and local governments would likely jump at the opportunity to switch if there's a company that can offer the same functional stack with the same support for the same price or cheaper built on top of FOSS. Otherwise... persuade those state and local governments to staff up to the necessary levels to be able to hire people able to customize and support the FOSS to fit their needs and be prepared to financially support that decision.

[marcosdumay]

> Cerner or Epic? SAP? ArcGIS?

Of those only ArcGIS isn't a basic CRUD, and yes, there are plenty of open source replacements for it. It's in fact way behind the open source tools.

There aren't for the others, because they are about paying a company so you can use its other customers data, or paying it to get overpriced consultants. None of them are about software.

[vonseel]

Epic/Cerner/SAP may be CRUD apps with clunky and outdated interfaces, but I wouldn't classify them as basic. Those applications are massive and have a ton of legacy code to connect different things. I'd suspect much of the rest of their staying power does lie in the company's scale and relationships, as well as their domain knowledge. It would cost massive amounts to build a viable competitor to any of them, and you'd need people who understood the problem space well enough to know what code to write. Doesn't matter if it's just a basic CRUD app built on top of a standard RDBMS, if you don't know what features are needed.

[vineyardmike]

I agree, but realistically that’s tough. Sometimes the government just needs a tool like everyone else. And something that works and is available today off the shelf is the best you’ll get.

Sure it’d be great for government acquisitions to subsidize open source, but at what cost?

[brigandish]

Perhaps a "you can pay for closed source but must prove you looked into using open source first" kind of thing? Much like the restraints on employment immigration so that companies must try and employ locally first.

[shagie]

Hypothetically, say an organization is looking for bug tracking and project management software that is cloud hosted.

This is for 200 users and it needs 24/7 support. The budget is $30k/y.

Ahh, you could spin up Redmine on AWS for much less...

Maybe, but I'm going to need to hire a Redmine consultant to help configure it for our needs, add maintaining and updates for that instance to the sysadmin and add it to the helpdesk support - and if we really want 24/7 support, our helpdesk is only 7-5 business hours (the support is for the 'it crashed' which means that the sysadmin gets it on pager duty... but if there's an issue that's application support, so wake up an application team person who isn't on pager duty...). And there's a bug in Redmine, so either get a developer to learn Ruby (this is a Java shop) or beg the core team to fix it...

You know, Jira is looking more attractive as these likely costs start adding up - and it's a fixed price... not going to have an AWSh.. surprise if a bitcoin miner exploits an issue on the base image that didn't get updated.

Local and state governments do look at open source first. The "no cost to start" is very attractive until they get to a "this is a hard problem, you're on your own" and the costs go way past what a commercial application costs.

For government, a predictable budget so that you can ask for next year is valuable. Unknown budgetary costs are were overruns happen. A budget line item of $26,500 per year is much better than a budget line of "$0 to $50,000."