Proprietary often has a lower total cost of ownership than the comparable loss of productivity and loss of support compared to open source software.
Do you have a good example of a company that provides support comparable to Microsoft's www.office.com (word, excel, powerpoint, outlook, teams, and one note). Note that this is a web instance which means that the cost of installing and managing software updates on various computers is reduced.
The lower taxes is not guaranteed at all when looking at the total cost of ownership.
With open source software, this often means increasing the staffing (because there's no corresponding org that will do the support with the necessary SLA) which also means that there isn't necessarily more efficient government.
The "better software for all to use" - switching to LibreOffice (or one of its forks) doesn't mean that the open source developers are going to prioritize the issues from Smith County, KS when there's an issue that impacts them.
To go down this path of "lets have government use open source" it is first necessary to get the open source developers to want to make their product competitive for government use compared to the proprietary ones that are out there and for companies to step up and provide similar SLAs that Microsoft and others offer.
That is something that can happen now, but isn't because there isn't enough interest from the FOSS community to do that for that sector. Trying to push the public sector to do it would be painful, expensive, and inefficient and not result in any better software.
> Proprietary often has a lower total cost of ownership
I think you are right in the short run, but I think in the long run TCO is far higher with proprietary software. Because you are sinking money into a lost cause and delaying the cost of a future expensive migration from the closed source to the open source.
People and organizations will always want to mold their software to their domain, and for a while and for the right price, that works. But proprietary companies sweep technical debt under the rug, talent leaves, they start to slow down, and eventually the software slows down the organization considerably. It becomes harder for the organization to hire and train people on the proprietary stack. I recently spent a week working alongside federal employees and almost without exception everyone hated their tech stack, attributed a double digit percentage of their productivity lost to it, and would often build things using open source on their own machines to get work done.
Eventually the org switches to a more open source stack, but the process to extract themselves is costly. I think that cost might be greater than the cost of just starting with open source in the first place.
It seems almost like a natural law that all proprietary software is eventually replaced by open source alternatives.
> Do you have a good example of a company that provides support comparable to Microsoft's www.office.com
Not as a package, no. For each individual item, there are alternatives, but I'll agree there is a missing offering for a fully self hosted alternative to Google Workspaces or Microsoft Office 365. If I'm not mistaken, Collabra Online is trying to be that, but the execution seems to leave something to be desired.
> The "better software for all to use" - switching to LibreOffice (or one of its forks) doesn't mean that the open source developers are going to prioritize the issues from Smith County, KS when there's an issue that impacts them.
I wonder if ChatGPT could influence things here. I wonder if support agents from ChatGPT trained on loads of open source content and code will turn out to be more effective than human support agents for proprietary stacks, and you might be able to build an open Office365 or Google Workspace competitor.
Anyway, just doing some back of the envelope math, I estimate governments in the USA spend $20B - $50B a year on proprietary software[1]. It certainly gives a lot to open source too, but I believe if more of that money was diverted to open source we'd all be better off in the long run. Not a slam dunk case, I know, I'm at the early stages of this line of thought. And of course, even if you could prove that open source would have a much lower TCO, it would be a protracted battle to go up against the folks with a lot of money on the line to deny that truth.
[1] According to this site (https://www.itdashboard.gov/itportfoliodashboard) it looks like total unclassified Federal Government IT spending is ~$84B a year. It looks like Palantir alone gets $1B a year from the government. The latest information I can find on Oracle is that 25% of their revenue comes from US Gov (so say ~$12B per year). Microsoft is perhaps $5 - $25B? Not sure.
Money isn't diverted to open source - its spent on staffing (both in house and consultancies) needed to support the open source software.
Hiring Deloitte or Accenture or another consultancy to provide the support for an open source piece of software (be it directly or "we need to have people with these skills") is still extracting money from the org and I can assure you that the consultancy isn't contributing back to FOSS.
As it is, Microsoft is a known quantity with a support SLA that meets the necessary requirements both for hosting of data and for response time. The cost of Microsoft licenses and support is less than the cost of hiring additional staff or bringing in a consultancy.
A budget item with a fixed number in it is much preferable for budgetary allocation than open ended numbers typically found from consultancies.
The support of open source software is often more costly for the public sector than going with a big tech solution - even when including the cost of licensing.
Until the cost of support for open source solutions comes down to where the proprietary options are, it is often not something that is considered.
RedHat is an example of a company that is doing it right - offering the support that the public sector desires with a consistent budget line item.
If you can stand up a PostgreSQL instance that is able to compete with the Oracle performance and support (e.g. backup restore failed - call support and have someone on the phone helping now) for less than the cost of the Oracle licensing you will have people beating down your door to sign up.
Same thing with Microsoft.
For the federal government to do this on their own is much more costly. It goes back to the consultancies to implement, migrate, and maintain. Trying to staff up to be competitive to be able to do it in house is also quite costly (note the pay difference between public sector and private and then multiply that difference as an ongoing expense by the number of employees needed).
And so this returns back to the FOSS community to address the needs of the public sector and create the needed companies that are competitive to be able to provide that ongoing support.
ChatGPT will not write an office.com competitor this decade... or next.
I think your assessment of the current situation is probably accurate.
My point is it's suboptimal, and the U.S. Federal Government could change things, as the biggest buyer of tech in the world. If they said "everything has to be public domain", it would be a seismic event. I think we would all be better off if they did this (probably with the exception of <1% who would lose monopoly profits).
Nit: I think you misread my ChatGPT comment. I said ChatGPT could be a competitor to office.com's _support_ agents, not that ChatGPT could build office.com.
Do you have a good example of a company that provides support comparable to Microsoft's www.office.com (word, excel, powerpoint, outlook, teams, and one note). Note that this is a web instance which means that the cost of installing and managing software updates on various computers is reduced.
The lower taxes is not guaranteed at all when looking at the total cost of ownership.
With open source software, this often means increasing the staffing (because there's no corresponding org that will do the support with the necessary SLA) which also means that there isn't necessarily more efficient government.
The "better software for all to use" - switching to LibreOffice (or one of its forks) doesn't mean that the open source developers are going to prioritize the issues from Smith County, KS when there's an issue that impacts them.
To go down this path of "lets have government use open source" it is first necessary to get the open source developers to want to make their product competitive for government use compared to the proprietary ones that are out there and for companies to step up and provide similar SLAs that Microsoft and others offer.
That is something that can happen now, but isn't because there isn't enough interest from the FOSS community to do that for that sector. Trying to push the public sector to do it would be painful, expensive, and inefficient and not result in any better software.