do your own homework

Posted Jan 8, 2026 17:39 UTC (Thu) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75)
In reply to: do your own homework by dsommers
Parent article: European Commission issues call for evidence on open source

For FOSS, you need companies like Red Hat to provide a similar number - because no politician will start digging into all the various components needed for them to be able to do their job and calculate a cost spread across thousands of open source projects and then figure out the expertise need for the maintenance and support. That won't fly well, and they won't really task this to their expertise groups if they don't initially believe it's worthwhile.

This is where the civil service needs to get involved. If a politician really wants to think about replacing proprietary software with FOSS, they should consult their own in-house experts. Politicians may not have the expertise or motivation to figure out what it would cost to develop their own FOSS solution, but governments do have large IT departments that have the expertise needed to answer those kinds of questions. Maybe some of those experts are in the pockets of Big Tech and will inflate the cost, but I'm sure some of them are just as fed up dealing with Big Tech as the rest of us and would love to replace everything with a FOSS stack that's under their control.

I would even suggest that hiring FOSS authors as civil servants is a practical alternative to hiring some big tech company like Red Hat. For the price they'd pay a big tech company like Red Hat- much less what they're currently paying to Microsoft, Google, et. al.- a national government could probably afford to hire dozens or even hundreds of their own developers. That would be plenty to make their own customized version of an existing distribution that would serve their specific needs.