Governments should not support open source

The article correctly points out that just because the software license is $0 doesn't mean that you can change an organization's entire IT infrastructure for free. Proprietary vs open source TCO studies always tend to disagree depending on who's funding the study, and that's ok. If you're $_MEGA_CORP with an IT strategy that's working for you, there's no need to rock the boat. Where open source really shines is in enabling the smaller guys to be able to keep up with the bigger guys, and numbers-wise, there's a lot more of us smaller guys which means that there will be a healthy open source ecosystem for years to come.

I agree with the author that open standards are important, and if governments can achieve that with proprietary software then that may be ok, but unfortunately with the mess that was OOXML, I don't know if I can trust a proprietary company like Microsoft to choose open standards when these open standards make for less vendor lock-in as opposed to more.

Even though this research was funded by Microsoft, they don't seem to actually be saying what the edited headline here is claiming.

Instead they bust "myths" like open source programmers not often being employed/paid to do the work, or businesses using both open source and proprietary software together.

All very boring, but I suppose someone has to put in the legwork to confirm what anyone paying attention knows in some academicly respectable manner.