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Governments Are Spending Billions on Software They Can Get with Freedom

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Thursday 14th of February 2019 08:30:50 PM Filed under
OSS

In the proprietary software world, when software is released, and when users buy that software, they don’t usually buy the entire software, but instead, they buy what’s known as an end-user license agreement (EULA). This EULA gives them the right to do only some specific things with that software. Usually, users are not allowed to copy, redistribute, share or modify the software, which is the main difference between proprietary software and free software (as in freedom).

It’s extremely annoying and sad that in the 21st century, governments all around the world are still paying millions of dollars for software each year; It’s more sad, because they are not paying for software, they are paying for a license to use a software in a specific way on yearly basis. Now say you were a country with millions of machines, can you just imagine the amounts of money that we are spending worldwide just to get those computers working?

More importantly, you don’t get the software. You just get a usage license that you must renew after a year. While free software gives you the 4 basic freedoms: The ability to read, modify, redistribute and use the software in any way you want.

Choosing to run a proprietary software over free software-where alternatives do exist-is an extremely wrong decision that governments are doing worldwide. And by choosing proprietary software over free software, we are losing huge amounts of money that instead could’ve been spent on health, education, public infrastructure or anything else in the country.

More importantly, the money that’s going to to pay for this software and its support could’ve been invested in developing alternative free solutions their selves; How about instead of spending $50M per year on the EULAs of Microsoft Office because “LibreOffice is not good”, that you just try to invest $25M in LibreOffice itself for one time only and see what happens? As a country, your technical infrastructure will develop if you turn it not just to a user of free software, but a producer as well. And only free software would allow you to do that.

During the period of our investigation, we checked the financial reports of many governments worldwide and their spending on IT. The amounts of money that governments are paying per year for proprietary software is very huge. And most of it isn’t actually for the licenses of using that software, but for the support.

It’s an issue, because it’s not going to end. Governments are claiming problems and issues in transferring to free software, and in doing that, they keep paying millions and millions of dollars each year, and continue to do so indefinitely; They have no plans to switch to free (as in freedom) locally-developed alternatives.

Let’s see some examples of how governments worldwide are spending their money on software.

Read more

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