>A single piece of software can be used by multiple different governments... In which case no one government has "paid for it". That is the point of free softw

>A single piece of software can be used by multiple different governments... In which case no one government has "paid for it". That is the point of free software. NASA writes a software so why should any other person/government need to redo the same effort twice? They got their moneys worth for their work so if someone enjoys that later for free, why is that a problem? Suppose a small municipality needs a small backscratch software, they hire a local Dev, that Dev gets the job done and the municipality releases it as free software. Now why shouldn't any other govt anywhere in the world not leverage that? Why can't you pay Microsoft to develop a new feature in Linux kernel for example? Why do you assume a for profit entity has to keep their work proprietary? Do you know how freelancing or project based jobs work? A tender is made and L1 is chosen. The output should be open sourced so what's the problem?