Anecdata, but most DoD program managers (CIV, CTR, or MIL) I know who work on software programs are generally driven by a need to solve the problems that they face. They gladly embrace open source solutions when they're made available easily.
> (1) Government employees may contribute to existing OSS projects (including being the primary maintainer) as part of their official duties, so long as they consult with their supervisor first to ensure a common-sense approach for contributions that preserve Operations Security (OPSEC) and further the Government's interests.
AT the bare minimum, even doing it yourself, it costs more money to create a company and apply for 501C3 status than the paltry sums of money most projects receive in donations.
NB there's no such thing as an "Open Source community", just individuals and orgs with different goals: some want to show off, some want additional maintainers if at all possible, some want to give away their complement, some want to establish an alternative to a competitor's product, some want to promote a language or format, some want xGPL for political reasons, yet others don't care at all
I work at a Navy research center that's 3000+ employee strong and feeds all of DoD (we're a working capital fund, meaning we take customers to fund ourselves). In four years here, I've worked projects sponsored by Air Force, DHS/CBP, Navy, Marines, and two three letter agencies. There was no general involved in any of them, and I don't know any projects by coworkers that involved acquisition of technology. As for my projects, all except one still still in R&D have transitioned into production systems. All involve OSS to some degree. One was a design for a COTS multi source information fusion system meant to be deployed in the cloud and has all the open source tech there you'd expect, NiFi, Kafka, Spark, etc. My current project is a combination of us (correlation) and two contractors (separately IT and predictive models). Again, it's all the OSS and tech you'd expect to find in a real time analytics/tipping system and CI/CD pipeline/orchestration.
I bring up my experience not to say you're wrong but to show there are other avenues it comes in. There are lots of research labs, and researchers aren't about buying software from contractors.
In these DoD research environments (I've worked in them before), researchers typically aren't about building software, either. It's expensive, even if you hire the teams. Not always, but unless your research is technology driven, it tends to be about cutting corners on software and delivering research quality MVPs (semi-working prototypes) while all focus is on the research. You can forget overhead of best practice infrastructure for development/engineering, that's wasted overhead in some of those group's eyes. The more theoretical it is, the easier it is to get away with, the more applied, the less easy it is to handwave away reality.
If you're at a heavily funded technology focused org like NRL (which the description sounds a lot like--neat stuff comes out of NRL), then this can be the case. There are, however, a lot of DoD funded research labs that are dumpster fires in terms of the software--NRL is almost the golden child compared to most of them. Again, in some such labs, a project may only have sufficient budget for 0.05 to 0.1 FTEs worth of software engineers. In such cases, 0.4 FTEs of software engineers can be considered a significant investment for a project, which is beyond laughable.
I'm not sure what the typical cost for an FTE are in industry, but I believe they are lower than 3-4x base salary.
There are often large gaps between the mission requirements and the technical capabilities of open sources software, and research labs lack the expertise and budget to address those gaps in practice. Of course, the usual system integrators can't build this software either but they will charge the taxpayer a lot of money to fail at it.
What is that based on? Have you worked at DoD? Is there research supporting it?
DoD acquisition depends much more on civilians, not uniformed officers, and then they must be part of the President's budget and, ultimately, Congress. Officers play a minor role.
License fees are a rounding error compared to the cost of personnel.