>The paucity of open source LMS likely reflects the uneasy relation of the public sector with open source more broadly. You'd think its a marriage made in heaven: public funds, procurement etc leveraged optimally for common good infrastucture - where that makes sense. But in practice this mode seems entirely marginal. It may be corporate capture, lack of savvy people among decision makers or other factors.

This is interesting. I had the exact same experience working in a major bank. Corporate would usually rather buy anything than "invest" in open source.

Partly it's a question of "support" (getting RHEL instead of CentOS) even though in practice support is often rather poor and distant. More frustrating is when we buy what are clearly simple reskins of OSS with terrible support from eg Oracle. You get all the disadvantages of using OSS (sometimes poor documentation, too many configuration options etc) while also not having code access or control over the platform.

I've come to the conclusion that corporate is sketched out by OSS because there is no one to sue of something goes awry, and that they just don't trust in-house expertise over basically any vendors. To be honest, they are not entirely wrong about the second one: this kind of corporate culture makes good engineers leave.