[perpetuated]

Because the Government Digital Service are, for the most part, ideologues. Disagree though I may with much of their policy, it's novel that a Government department actually have drive and direction.

Love their line of F/OSS, but they've done nothing with it, other than Gov.uk. I can't see them accepting pseudonymous pull requests, though.

[FourthProtocol]

F/OSS is great for gov.uk. It's a very bad idea anywhere else. There's no government department I've encountered that doesn't rely on Active Directory, and there are a lot of projects where F/OSS is being pushed and then abandoned.