| Soleron said: Government IT contracts with Microsoft, Cisco, IBM, HP etc. etc. When you give IBM a maintenence contract the first thing they do is hire 30 people to do it. Why not hire those people yourself, cut out the overhead, and get loyalty? |
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...
