🚀 go-pugleaf

I'm trying to come up with a rough estimate of how much the federal 
government is spending each year to license software from vendors such as 
Microsoft, WordPerfect, Novell, etc. for software to accomplish ordinary 
officework.

That is to say, I'm trying to figure out how much of the taxpayers' money 
could be saved if the federal government were to buy software licenses 
less and use free software more.

From that answer follows an interesting question: Is it in the public 
interest for the federal government to sponsor the FSF (or some other 
entity) to create a particular piece of software for the purpose of 
obviating the need to license its commercial equivalent?

A practical example:

Suppose Microsoft elects in 1996 to release DOS 7.0, and suppose the 
federal government has one million PCs for which the individual agencies 
elect to purchase an upgrade at, say, twenty dollars each.  Wouldn't it 
be wiser to sponsor some organization (such as the FSF) for some fraction 
of that twenty million dollars to create something called FreeDOS that could 
replace proprietary DOSs?  Consider that the government's need to ever 
license a DOS again is gone forever and that revenues from private 
computer users who might buy documentation and/or media would probably 
pay for continued improvement of FreeDOS for the forseeable future.


So, any concrete numbers (or educated guesses) on what these totals are 
would be awfully helpful.  I'm in the early stages of creating a 
public-interest advocacy group devoted to reducing the amount of 
taxpayers' money that is spend on software licenses by encouraging the 
sponsorship, development, and use of free software.  (Please note that 
such a narrow purpose is slightly different from the FSF's broad goal of 
advocating free software in general.  I am restricting myself to reducing 
how much of the taxpayers' money goes to software hoarders.  If such an 
effort results in more free software for the private computer user, so 
much the better - but that's not my primary motivation.)

Also, any pointer to mailing-lists or other resources related to free 
software within the federal government (or state governments) will be 
appreciated.

-- 
Dave Marshall
dmarshal@netcom.com