Having met government IT people (at the municipal, provincial and federal level) that would be disastrously bad ...

It has been my experience that the larger the corporation a person comes from, and the longer they have been there, the worse they are as an IT professional. While there are exceptions to this, governmental IT departments are full of employees who are more interested in their pension than technology and the only way they can do their job is because it has been simplified by companies like Microsoft, Cisco, IBM, HP, etc.

I don't disagree with the concept that companies could save a fortune by moving towards Linux (both as servers and on the desktop), but a large portion of the reason why governments choose to hire large companies to design and implement their infastructure is because their employees are not good enough to do it.

Secret cat welfare payments to single feline parents of 2 or more kittens.

It's $100 billion a year black hole of expenditure

Letting all those immigrants enter and giving them apartments and financial aid because they are to lazy to work and letting them starve would be inhumane pfft.

(I am not talking about refugees that flee from their country due to various crisis I am talking about those lazy f**** that come because all their cousins etc are already here and they heard that you dont have to do anythign to get money in the west....)

I want canada style You need to speak the language you need to bring a specific amount of money and double it in a year or so and you have to have apprenticeship/education/training/qualification that is of use for the country.
Noone needs parasite losers that suck on ones nipple for free milk and then shit on your lap.

There are numerous flaws with this proposal.

First and foremost, your assuming that Government would be more efficient at it than IBM... that's a stretch.

More importantly, I work at HSBC... and they point BLANK refuse to use Open Source software. Why? Because when they buy products from IBM and Cisco, those two companies will do everything to make sure that you never have a problem. When you have a customer as large as HSBC, you need to keep them. As time goes on, HSBC has been employing more IBM solutions, over open-source. Because the IBM solutions have consistently costed them less. Hell, HSBC used to use vanilla Eclipse for certain projects, but have switched to an IBM variant of it.

Governments need to become more aggressive in their purchasing (ie - less corruption), but stick to corporate vendors, if they are more aggressive buyers, then the vendors will work as hard as they do with HSBC. If you have a non-profit providing your products... what incentive do they have to fix your problems?

The final thing is, you're missing out on the importance of out-sourcing. Government buys a lot of paper. They also own a lot of forrest land. Why not cut out the middle man and make their own? They sit on a lot of chairs, too...

Ballsacks whenever a man has two kids. I'm talking vasectomy. You don't need any more than two..

Don't know if it has been mentioned, I haven't read through yet, but STOP MANUFACTURING GOODS IN CHINA or whatever is the latest, cheapest place to manufacture something.

The value of locally manufactured, assembled, and produced goods is that it creates work for local people. Even if a factory, in order to be inexpensive has to employ robotic technology. Those 300 workers, rather than 30,000 in China are making a living income that is capable of sustaining them and their families.

Shareholder profits cannot be the drive for businesses, it has to be community. If it isn't, eventually the community necessary to keep the corporation in business will be gone.

The other problem with this is you create a silo.  When you use customized software you develop a skilled worker, yes, but you also develop a worker with certain job security.  Again, not a bad thing, that is until they get promoted, fired, die, or leave the company for any number of reasons.  All of a sudden you now have someone who has never done anything with this software that has to maintain and support it.  Custom code is a necessity, but technology changes quickly and skill sets vary.  You could be lucky and have a developer that can breeze through unfamiliar code and be able to maintain and support it, if not optimize it.  However, you could also be unlucky enough to get someone who barely understands the code they're asked to maintain and support.  God forbid they need to optimize it or worse do so at the fundamental level of an OS.

I worked in a business that relied on custom code.  The belief that custom code is cheaper than a common consumer product is laughable.  It often is actually more expensive, and if you have to customize everything from the ground up, it becomes even more expensive.  You need standardized layers on which you put customized code.  You don't want every layer of your IT infrastructure to be customized requiring a long build-up to productivity.

We had a situation where I worked where we had to fix code for a bug that was resolved in the OS.  The code was only about 2 years old, but the programmer who wrote it was no longer with the company.  The source code, missing because at the time our code repository was a file share on a directory server that no longer existed.  The code had to be reversed engineered requiring a significant amount of time and resources all to resolve a bug that was fixed in the OS. 

Now imagine in that situation, you  have people routinely building OS components, as well as middleware components, as well as server-client software.  Imagine you have a fluid IT employment base, meaning employees routinely move out of the company taking their skills with them.  Now imagine after upgrading to the next Kernel revision of Linux because it closes some significant security holes, your entire company goes offline.  Who do you turn to to figure out the problem?  Everyone has developed their own error reporting in their code.  Some are awesome, some non-existent. 

If I have custom-code running on top of open source software, the only people I can turn to are my employees.  If I have custom code running on top of commercial software, I can call up the vendor and get an engineer on site within 24 hours who can pinpoint the problem himself or send it back to a team at the home office to do it.  It may cost the same amount of money in terms of employees and time, but in terms of getting my business back up and running it costs DEARLY less.

Again, working from experience, we had this very scenario play out during our back-to-school "season" requiring us to get two vendors on site working with us for four months to resolve problems within their products and our infrastructure.  Granted, they told us to do the very thing I said we needed to do, but I'm a peon no-nothing.  With the management that was in place at the time they would have been in a worse situation than without being able to rely on the vendors.  BTW...that wasn't due to "poor management" that was due to "CYA management".   No one wants to be responsible for making the wrong decision, so they all cover their own asses and rely on an outside vendor to make the tough choices for them.  

Open source may often be free, but it bears a much higher cost in the long-term than commercial software.  It's a myth that it's cheaper.

That's the stupidest thing I've read today.  Yes, it would save money.  No, food would become more expensive.  Have you studied economics at all??

It costs every US Citizen .000000667¢ per month to feed a single person with no income using food stamps.

Compare that to the 52¢ per day it costs to feed a child in Africa.

I did some work experience at a contracted out small IT firm for the county council, and for directly employed RAF IT people, and they didn't know anything and they both employed whole people for months to do data entry jobs that I could set up with a 5-minute database import. I offered to do it and they went very, very quiet. I agree with your assessment of currently employed IT people.

I mean hire the very same people that IBM would hire. Do technical interviews and make the requirements clear. I have a lot of experience of military contracting and they basically hire everyone from scratch before working on a government project. 

And I don't mean move to Linux, the retraining costs are too high. I mean keep them on XP (and keep the old but still perfectly functional computers) and use free software instead of expensive paid licensed stuff. My school threw out 500+ working XP computers and replaced them with VERY slow Citrix thin client bullshit that fails literally half the time.