Governments should adopt and invest in FOSS

Since its taxpayers money, any custom made software for gov MUST be FOSS or we can equally abandon any logic whatsoever - citizens payed for it, gov employees were working with implementation team on shaping it, so it belongs to them. This doesn't have to be so for supportive domains such as databases but I would personally prefer that also (i.e. Postgresql instead Oracle db).

There are many more reasons for this then mentioned, including keeping more IT experts locally, better connections with academia, higher salaries for gov IT guys, less corruption etc.

The MAJOR thing is actually that gov companies and their systems are usually quite complex and not something that can be easily (or at all) correctly done by external team of any kind - you need to be there, on the spot, and live that system for years to know how to program it, improve it, and make it good for the country and its citizens. I worked for gov 15 years, and did many huge projects with various companies - IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Cisco etc... almost all being complete garbage, especially for the usual multi billion price that is payed to those corps yearly. There is an illusion that big names mean big and qualified team, good responsibility delegation (there is the 'nobody got fired for choosing IBM' thing) and that high price means quality, but in practice it never works like that, reality is quite the opposite (except responsibility delegation/dispersion which is totally true).

The major reason that proprietary software is so prominent in gov is corruption.

I’ve got news for you dude, cronyism is a lot worse when selling to corporations.

1. I think many public sector organizations in Europe lack basic knowledge of FOSS and have IT managers that don't even know what it is.

2. In many ways it is surprising that generic software like cloud office functionality in reality only have two suppliers, both from the US, in the public sector. The amount of money that is being paid by tax payers every year for that across the EU is staggering.

Maybe the Schrems 2 court decision will change #2 eventually but for the time being I see very few alternatives.

I agree completely. It's ridiculous seeing different cities, counties, states, etc reimplementing the same stuff from scratch. I realize every region is different but not that different.

I work for a government software development team (At least for the next week). I have other friends in other governments on other teams.

I can’t see a government being able to build generalized software or contribute effectively to it. Governments don’t tend to have people who say no to feature requests. The end result is not a generalized good solution, but extremely specific solutions built on a generalized platform of if statements and endless configuration setups with special cases weaved through.

Governments are used to getting to decree everything from the button shade to the location of the buttons (different departments might ask for different button placements and get it) to the database type used (for the same piece of software) to the cloud vendor to all manner of additional features that require threading them through the core software. They want piles of exceptions and special cases. They want every possible scenario from the paper based days to be included in the software or it is not sufficient for their purposes. They want to specify date formats. They want to have very custom reports.

To use OSS, you basically need a generalized thing many people can use. But each government department will rapidly make it far from generalized.