I just received a press release titled "Why Open Source Can't Meet Mass-Market Demands," from a group called the Institute for Policy Innovation which identifies itself as "a non-partisan, public-policy organization." (It's easy to determine that the IPI was founded by Dick Armey and is primarily a pro-free-trade group, I guess free trade can be argued to be non-partisan.) At first I was confused, because if you really believe in the free market, Open Source is a perfectly legitimate thing: people should be able to charge as much or as little for their work as they want. You have to make second- and third-order arguments to decry the economics of OS (perhaps OS implicitly drives down the perceived value of all programming, thus distorting the trade-offs associated with offshore programming, which in turn might suck the air out of high-value, entrepreneurial programming in the United States).

Then I realized that this was about government procurement: the IPI release is intended to introduce Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt into state and federal bureaucrats. Clearly, someone paid for this: I assume either Microsoft or the Software Publishing Association. I sent an email to IPI asking who paid for the initiative. I'll let you know what they say (if anything).

Correction: I misidentified the IPI as the "Institute for Policy Information" in an earlier post.