Isn’t it obvious?

Instead of having government rely on tech companies, it should just build its own solutions.

And those solutions would be open source and use open source dependencies.

It would then have a budget to donate to different projects given that it saves time by using other foss software.

Wonder if you could offer some sort of tax benefit for open source developers - maybe some sort of credit?

This book clarifies how to solve project-equity-for-contributions sanely, in startups.

It, therefore, also helps with solving how to do equity in FLOSS/OSS projects.

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/slicing%20pie%20handbook

Any project which may in the future be wanting to be paid full-time for some people, please understand that book.

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So easy! If you wanna get paid, just already be getting paid et voila:

The best defence against this is to have lot of paying sponsors!

Why not just offer to pay for specific features? There are existing platforms where users can vote on features they want and pay developers to implement them. If the government wants to support projects they should participate by founding desired features. This way there's no risk that they will take over the direction of the project.