Government use of open source (Score 1)

While I agree with the general sentiment regarding the ADTI paper, it does bring up one interesting and valid point in governmental adoption of open source software. While it is true that there is much to be gained from using software that is developed and improved by a large development community, there is much to be lost if the community dissolves.

The government (at this point) is not in a position to support their own software - they don't have the personnel (either in numbers or skill) for it. If the open source community continues to support government-adopted open source projects and provide the required feature sets and bug fixes, that's great. But if they are not, it is very difficult for the government to meet those needs internally. One valuable aspect (from the government's perspective) in using proprietary software is that it is very easy to offer to pay the company whose software needs improvements to do that work and ensure that government requirements are met. This is not nearly as easy for open source projects.

Note that this argument does not apply to software development projects funded by the government that are released under an open source license.