content: Some governments do precisely that, sometimes resulting in their own distributions.  Examples: Venezuela, Turkey, some local governments in Spain (Andalucía & Extremadura). It is most assuredly cheaper than paying Microsoft. Now, let us assume that there is a certain use-case that a government needs to be implemented and which currently has no "libre" solution, hiring a team to implement it would be a large one-time cost, but the running costs henceforth would be marginal - a small number of developers doing occasional fixes, allowing the project to be used on an unlimited number of workstations, while proprietary software generally requires buying a license for each machine and each new version.