I think there should be some important balance in this: 1. What exactly do we mean by open source here? Some of the benefits would even come with a source-avai

I think there should be some important balance in this: 1. What exactly do we mean by open source here? Some of the benefits would even come with a source-available model. Others would need actual permissive licensing. 2. Some public sector funding is strategic in the sense that the government wants to fund developments in some particular sector of the economy to help bootstrap the strategic industry (for instance the space sector in the UK works a lot like this). In this case its not clear what advantage there would be in mandatory open sourcing... But perhaps say you can keep it closed for 12 months after the end of the funding, then mandatory open sourcing? Gives a 12 month head start seems generous enough. 3. There is a reasonable argument when bidding on a contract where a vendor says: we won't implement this from scratch, but we will fund this by selling the same solution to other customers, and as such we can deliver this cheaper than other bidders but only as closed source. This seems valid (i.e. its a build vs buy decision essentially) and I think government organisations that have real budgets will need to make these tradeoffs occasionally. But perhaps there should be a mandated minimum discount that needs to be achieved (i.e. we're willing to pay 25% more for an open source solution, if you can't outbid that then we are obliged to choose a more expensive but open source supplier).