[jdvh]

Certainly not. I don't believe progress is always good. But subsidies should be reserved for ambitious projects that push the state of the art forward. For those projects that realistically will not get funded commercially. CERN, for instance.

[panarky]

Building this allows them to reduce the subsidy that is perpetual software license fees.

[jdvh]

In exchange for perpetual development and maintenance costs. Total cost of ownership doesn't go down by rolling your own in-house.

[rglullis]

Having a FOSS alternative allows you to share the R&D costs with other interested parties.

At the very least, it works as a bargaining chip when it comes to negotiating contracts with the private sector.

[semi-extrinsic]

If that's true in a large organization, how do SaaS companies actually make a profit?

If you develop an in-house tool, you have very predictable user numbers so you can go on-prem versus cloud for the compute and save ~10x on that side.

You also have the benefit of being second, the other guys already did the hard work of UX research etc. and your in-house team just needs to replicate a slightly complicated CRUD app.

The one significant roadblock I can see is being able to put together the right team for the job. But cost-wise it has to be a no-brainer that in-house is cheaper.

[rglullis]

How is that a subsidy?

They are putting their resources into the development of a product that can be universally shared and used. There is no favored party.

Also, I completely disagree with the "ambitious projects". I actually would favor the government let all the risky ventures to private enterprises and focused only on tried-and-true developments and make them universally available to its citizens.