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If they put even a portion of the funds they would have spent into funding said free projects... I mean GnuPG is now no longer requiring or even accepting donat
by andrewclunn 5y ago
If they put even a portion of the funds they would have spent into funding said free projects... I mean GnuPG is now no longer requiring or even accepting donations because of what a German city level government did to promote open source: https://lwn.net/Articles/880248/ https://lwn.net/Articles/880248/
Governments sharing and pooling their resources for open source just makes sense.
- bruce511 5y agoYou bring up a falacy here which I see a lot. >> "If they put even a portion of the funds they would have spent into funding said free projects" That's not how govt, or even private, spending works. Govt spending doesn't say "hey, we saved money not buying windows, let's donate money to the Linux foundation". Assuming they save money at all (after retraining, support etc) it simply gets put back in the pot to be spent, or wasted, on the next thing. Donating from govt funds is really hard, and is frankly just too much like hard work. It's the same for business. We use free software all day long, but money saved there goes to lots of things, actually contributing to Open Source is an uphill battle.
- andrewclunn 5y agoOpen source has figured this out, and have "support plans' a business or government can purchase.
- akvadrako 5y agoNH's state government is one of the smallest in the union; there's no sales or income tax and only about a million people. So what you suggest would be more viable in almost every other state in the US or EU.