> Proprietary often has a lower total cost of ownership

I think you are right in the short run, but I think in the long run TCO is far higher with proprietary software. Because you are sinking money into a lost cause and delaying the cost of a future expensive migration from the closed source to the open source.

People and organizations will always want to mold their software to their domain, and for a while and for the right price, that works. But proprietary companies sweep technical debt under the rug, talent leaves, they start to slow down, and eventually the software slows down the organization considerably. It becomes harder for the organization to hire and train people on the proprietary stack. I recently spent a week working alongside federal employees and almost without exception everyone hated their tech stack, attributed a double digit percentage of their productivity lost to it, and would often build things using open source on their own machines to get work done.

Eventually the org switches to a more open source stack, but the process to extract themselves is costly. I think that cost might be greater than the cost of just starting with open source in the first place.

It seems almost like a natural law that all proprietary software is eventually replaced by open source alternatives.

> Do you have a good example of a company that provides support comparable to Microsoft's www.office.com

Not as a package, no. For each individual item, there are alternatives, but I'll agree there is a missing offering for a fully self hosted alternative to Google Workspaces or Microsoft Office 365. If I'm not mistaken, Collabra Online is trying to be that, but the execution seems to leave something to be desired.

> The "better software for all to use" - switching to LibreOffice (or one of its forks) doesn't mean that the open source developers are going to prioritize the issues from Smith County, KS when there's an issue that impacts them.

I wonder if ChatGPT could influence things here. I wonder if support agents from ChatGPT trained on loads of open source content and code will turn out to be more effective than human support agents for proprietary stacks, and you might be able to build an open Office365 or Google Workspace competitor.

Anyway, just doing some back of the envelope math, I estimate governments in the USA spend $20B - $50B a year on proprietary software[1]. It certainly gives a lot to open source too, but I believe if more of that money was diverted to open source we'd all be better off in the long run. Not a slam dunk case, I know, I'm at the early stages of this line of thought. And of course, even if you could prove that open source would have a much lower TCO, it would be a protracted battle to go up against the folks with a lot of money on the line to deny that truth.

[1] According to this site (https://www.itdashboard.gov/itportfoliodashboard) it looks like total unclassified Federal Government IT spending is ~$84B a year. It looks like Palantir alone gets $1B a year from the government. The latest information I can find on Oracle is that 25% of their revenue comes from US Gov (so say ~$12B per year). Microsoft is perhaps $5 - $25B? Not sure.