A long while back, my city paid for a billing system. Was something like 30, 40 million bucks. They did not own the code, or if they did, were not in a position to make that the benefit it should have been.

Long story short, they ended up paying a lot more for support, updates, bug fixes and the like. And then did it again to finally arrive at something workable!

A group of people, myself included took this to government as an example where open code could be a much better investment.

For that same sum, an entity could be created to develop that code, making for local jobs, local revenue and a very likely savings over the long life possible.

Maintenance fees could provide the entity with the staff needed to maintain that code, until it pays for itself.

Additionally, that entity could make it available to other municipalities, and or consult on that problem domain. That turns what us currently a cost center into revenue that could, at a minimum, lower the cost of the utility currently paying way too much for software not really adding that much value.

We got bipartisan support. Industry lobbyists killed it off back then. Our bad. At the time, the thrust was to get OSS written into law as a must consider. The industry arguments and ability to lobby won the day, and were compelling to legislstors who were not well equipped to really grok the potential benefits.

What we shouod have done was push for and more fully develop the plans and non profit model needed to sell it as a project, or investment.

This all happened in the early 00's too. Its a bit different and even more plausible today, and legislators are more likely to understand it all better too.

Open code would mean other projects could build on that effort, and open data would mean the business of the people would be available where and how needed.

A project of this kind would end up sustainable and would yield consistent savings to every municipality using it, whether they developed it or not.

Once done, its a model for similar needs and costs and could be repeated anywhere. An umbrella foundation could unify these things, or several sprout up, each owning a needed domain, each making revenue and ending up self sustaining.

Over time, there would be various entities of this kind solving not sexy, but quite expensive and painful problems that really do need solving.

This kind of thing is not well matched to investors and founders looking to make big returns. The primary value is making public works, utilities, etc. lean, efficient.

It's also not well matched to proprietary software houses, who may well deliver great solutions, but at high margins and with closed and often expensive dependencies. Their solutions could be a bust too.

It's high risk.

Oregon vs Oracle comes to mind.

This kind of thing is well matched to a non profit type effort, or foundation and could easily be seen as a public work, of benefit to everyone, in that taxes, the cost of running the basics in society would be reduced for everyone.

Cheaper, efficient government basically.

Redirect the savings into things like potholes, schools, health care maybe.

With these kinds of resources, or even a modest fraction, a whole lot of good can be done.

Pair developers with domain experts and legislators, city council people and solve some problems. Each solution woukd likely displace closed, expensive software and doing that would be a public good where it's most needed.

While doing this would not make the Microsofts, Oracles of the world happy, it would mean a lot of people get to make a great living, and we all see the benefit of a more lean, efficient use of taxes actually adding value instead of mostly cost to our lives.