Proprietary software v interoperability
Anything that costs a significant sum of money, or would have a significant impact on people's lives, needs to be on standardised software. So that if things go South for one supplier the public can go to another*. Companies don't like this. The want us in a walled garden, so that we can't dodge between different suppliers with different prices. Beancounters love monopolies- as long as it's their monopoly.
*Even something as simple as encryption software. There are plenty of products out there that sound pretty good. But they all have their own way of handling the encrypted files. i.e. one can't open the files created by another, even if it uses the same sorts of algorithms.. So I stick with the usual ones, because if anything goes wrong I know that there will at least be lots of copies of the software around.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
