As a state government worker, this jives with my experience. The ultimate beneficiaries of any budget savings or improved processes are citizens who have no id

As a state government worker, this jives with my experience. The ultimate beneficiaries of any budget savings or improved processes are citizens who have no idea, let alone input, about what we're doing behind the scenes. It's very hard to convince public employees to work with those people in mind. You're right, the people buying the software are even harder to convince. With no good measures of effect, they rely on what's easiest for them. So Microsoft and PDFs everywhere. Our software licenses are paid through a grant from the federal government. If we replace them with open source software, we don't get to keep the difference. So now I have licensed software like SAS and ArcGIS gathering dust on my machine while I use R and Python. And sharing software we develop is even harder. I've pushed to release code for my statistical reports. When I said researchers and other states could benefit by reusing parts, my supervisors only saw it as a liability with no benefit to us. I might try to slip it in as part of the technical notes.