In almost every case I agree with the slogan 'use the best tool for the job.' But governments are a special case because they are using involuntarily-given pub

In almost every case I agree with the slogan 'use the best tool for the job.' But governments are a special case because they are using involuntarily-given public money and have a mandate to represent all citizens' interests and contribute to the public good. Funneling public money to corporations in the form of contracts is a great nexus of corruption. The duty of a government is to the people, not to prop up (say) Microsoft, which provides services but also manipulates the market. Any government which can build billions of dollars of military hardware annually can fix up or devise open source software. And then there is publicly usable software rather than JUST the perpetuation of a private company's strategy for claiming public money.