For far less than the cost of a vendor contract, any government could hire a few developers to work on “their” version of the OS, office suite, apps, etc etc.

For far less than the cost of a vendor contract, any government could hire a few developers to work on “their” version of the OS, office suite, apps, etc etc. It could act as a friendly fork. Good ideas in the fork could be upstreamed by the gov employees working with the project owners - or (since the gov-run fork is also open source) by literally anyone who wants that good idea upstream. Seems like the exact thing open source is good at!