"Helping for free" doesn't cut it when dealing with governments. Even if everyone had gone the Linux route 20 years ago we'd still have an entire ecosystem of commercial businesses selling and operating it; imagine what Red Hat would look like with Microsoft actually out of the picture.

We'd have just as many consultancy firms and layers of beuraucracy without Microsoft, and France wouldn't be operating their entire government IT stack, all the way down to individual workstations, that much cheaper than it is now.