I suppose it depends on the government, but my experience is that it’s more about familiarity and ease of maintenance.
In the US there are few actual digital services/ engineering / hackers who are employees. Mostly project managers and contract admins. So it’s frustrating to me seeing a mediocre commercial solution purchased because it’s easier to support than equivalent OSS that requires just a single person who knows how to admin something simple like Wordpress.
The number of times I’ve heard that SharePoint is superior to Wordpress for intranet and content management because it had better support would boggle any reasonable mind. No one is paying political cronies, just people trying to do their best without any direct understanding of what it takes to run these types of services.
I think the solution is to require a rigorous analysis of OSS in solution contracts. Then all the contractors supporting SharePoint will just support WordPress and funnel the license savings into more contractors.
In the US there are few actual digital services/ engineering / hackers who are employees. Mostly project managers and contract admins. So it’s frustrating to me seeing a mediocre commercial solution purchased because it’s easier to support than equivalent OSS that requires just a single person who knows how to admin something simple like Wordpress.
The number of times I’ve heard that SharePoint is superior to Wordpress for intranet and content management because it had better support would boggle any reasonable mind. No one is paying political cronies, just people trying to do their best without any direct understanding of what it takes to run these types of services.
I think the solution is to require a rigorous analysis of OSS in solution contracts. Then all the contractors supporting SharePoint will just support WordPress and funnel the license savings into more contractors.