Comment by AnthonyMouse

The real case here is software. The government can license it instead of writing it, but what it should actually do is buy it and release it into the public domain instead of licensing it. Which still doesn't require them to write it themselves, but in >90% of the cases they need software, they should be causing what they use to be in the public domain, and commissioning new code to release whenever the incumbents won't do it for less than the cost of writing new.