That, and they are expensive, because people expect them to be expensive. When, say, the national Police asks companies to come up with sofware to manage conta

That, and they are expensive, because people expect them to be expensive. When, say, the national Police asks companies to come up with sofware to manage contact details for all employees, you could come up with "Install and Configure SomeOpenSourceCRM on a VPS" for €3000. Whereas typically some Enterprise Consultancy quotes a factor hundred of that to "integrate" it in a crappy way. I've worked in such projects, for governments. The overhead is ridiculous. the NIH-syndrome is rampant. The specs and "but this is how we do things"-requirements are cut in stone. Very often a evening of tuning some Open Source tool could suffice; But either some rule disallowing the language/server/deploy-speed, or some manager disliking it because last year they decided that from now on everything must be Java+XML, or you need at least three weeks of meetings before you are allowed to even start. This is not a joke. I've had a simple off-the-shelve Rails tool cut down, because "we don't allow dynamic languages". I've had projects delayed with 3+ weeks because "we require a deploy-window to be announced 21 days in advance" and I've worked as only developer on a project with four(!) managers managing me. That is why government projects are expensive: a catch22: "Because they are".