What a strange wandering analogy-laden article. The actual benefits of open-source software to governments are pretty clear: 1) Many government services and p

What a strange wandering analogy-laden article. The actual benefits of open-source software to governments are pretty clear: 1) Many government services and programs rely heavily on software. Private vendors who supply proprietary software solutions to governments at high cost could be replaced by open-source solutions maintained by government employees, with the core code for each critical package updated regularly and checked constantly for security flaws by a separate entity. 2) Note that in this scenario, a great many techs across a wide variety of government agencies would be responsible for installing, monitoring, updating etc. their local systems, but the actual job of developing and maintaining the code body would be the job of another entity - something like a government-funded academic foundation. So yes, uninstall Windows across the board and install Linux. Huge savings right there. See Brazil, 2005: https://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/29/technology/brazil-free-softwares-biggest-and-best-friend.html https://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/29/technology/brazil-free-so... As far as the actual software-infrastructure interface, i.e. the code that critical infrastructure from the FAA to the trains to the electricity grid relies upon, let alone the nuclear power plants, well, "Stuxnet" is the first thing that should come to mind. That's a situation were security thinking should come first, and open-source avoids the 'security-through-obscurity' flaw, at least.