EU countries pledge to promote OSS within public administrations [pdf]
Not only FOSS should be promoted in use (as in PostgreSql) but in making (as in budget execution platform). Anything custom made for the gov MUST BE FOSS as money is from the people, so people MUST own it. Vendors should earn on initial development, and eventually subsequent support/consultation/upgrade if it happens (i.e. work exceeds gov capacity).<p>Big vendors that now get to do this via tenders do not have best interest in mind for the government (as it contradicts profits most of the time) and consequently people suffer. Also, there are usually independent levels of government that need to use the same or similar software (now they each order it from <i>independent</i> vendors so there are multiple platforms doing the same/similar thing each payed by tax money). Not to mention that they have access to local production data by necessity.<p>This could be further organized to include academia that could use those projects to bring on new generation of developers, security testers etc. There is really no down side to this, only benefits, along with less Oracle yacht racing.<p>I congratz Bulgaria for making those efforts and it looks like they succeeded: <a href="https://futurism.com/bulgaria-amends-law-to-require-open-source-governmental-software" rel="nofollow">https://futurism.com/bulgaria-amends-law-to-require-open-sou...</a>