As they make software and hardware purchases, governments are creatures of habit.

They form long relationships with IT vendors and stick with them so they can keep their IT systems running with minimal interruptions.

If you are a local government IT official in the U.S. today, it’s likely easier for you to pick up a phone and get easy, quick answers from proprietary software vendors to find technology products to fill your needs, rather than having to manually sort through the sometimes fragmented world of open source projects to find a good fit.