• will@lemm.ee
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    1 day ago

    Most of the govt fees are going to be for service and support, not licensing, so even with FOSS software they would need to find European vendors willing and able to provide everything from tech support to hotfixes to planned upgrades.

      • will@lemm.ee
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        1 day ago

        Governments are not big monolithic things, at federal, state and local levels there can be hundreds or thousands of users/endpoints to support. Nobody does that in house, even Fortune 500 companies outsource service and support (that’s how companies like RedHat, Xen, etc got so big when they were still making FOSS software). From another angle it’s about risk reduction, since if something comes up you have a vendor to blame.

      • Pup Biru@aussie.zone
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        1 day ago

        you could, but governments tend to be particularly inefficient because they’re very risk-averse. everything they do has to be documented, every decision justified

        it’s so risk-averse that it’s a massive risk in fact ;)

        outsourcing allows them to say “but it wasn’t us!”