> What if the government can get better capability out of a SaaS product paid for by private capital than they can out of something they build themselves? That

> What if the government can get better capability out of a SaaS product paid for by private capital than they can out of something they build themselves? That’s fine as long as the parts developed and paid for with taxes are open sourced. > Are we saying government's should just be locked into single-build custom software for all eternity? Not sure I follow. There’s no reason why software cannot be developed and supported by multiple for-profit entities. As long as the output is open source. > A single piece of software can be used by multiple different governments... In which case no one government has "paid for it". As a taxpayer, that’s not my problem. It is the problem of company behind the software. > In that scenario, how is a government any different to any other B2B customer? It’s different because the money the government operates on comes from taxes. The government should put the money back in the local economy and finance the development of the open source software. I understand that this is a very loaded statement.