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Comment by cheez | Hacker News Reader

Imagine your job is to implement a new software-based process. Something goes wrong. The server is down. Who do you call?

This is why open source is treated like a leper: there is no one to call or the support is so disparate that it's hopeless.

Solve the problems that lead them to making those decisions.

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Now imagine that the company you bought the software from no longer exists. You're correct about one of the issues with FLOSS adoption, but you're framing it wrong: any software can have support issues. The biggest advantage of FLOSS that the government has written and shared is that they can get competitive bids for maintenance contracts, rather than being stuck with one vendor.

"They can get competitive bids instead of be stuck with a single vendor" can be translated as "they have to go through a complicated months long process to find a contractor instead of dial a 1-800 number and get the patch in two weeks."

They already had to go through the months-long process to get that 1-800 number in the first place (unless of course they "just choose IBM"). FLOSS doesn't short-ciruit that, it just shifts it to a different phase of procurement.

Selling the service to create open source software to solve a problem government has, then selling long term support and extensibility for it, is a recipe that has worked for at least one multi-billion dollar company.

That's the recipe I would follow.

Which I that company - sounds like a plan

Red Hat

Open source software should come with a support contract, and the government can easily change contractors, which is not the case with the proprietary software.

Agreed - but I am now focusing on trying to find a few authorities who want a given solution created, then have them invest the seed money, and try to sell dual "create and support" licenses to others.

It's possible to get open-source software with support contracts. Red Hat and Canonical are two companies that offer this. However, there does seem to be a gap in the market for a company that offers similar support contracts for open-source software running on Windows and OS X.

Completely agree. This is the point. We live in software, everyone else doesn't. "Just please make my job easy, I don't want to know about Github"

Get the OSS for free and use the money saved to pay a support developer?

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