New York Rents the Software It Should Own
The city is putting two citywide IT purchasing contracts in place right now — $1.2 billion with SHI and $800 million with CDW — to go on renting proprietary software year after year, with nothing owned at the end, nothing the city can inspect or fix, and nothing it can afford to walk away from. Cities around the world have replaced these systems with faster, better and cheaper open source alternatives. Here are six reasons New York should do the same.
Nobody can fully account for what the city pays. The City Comptroller’s 2026 review of the city’s master agreements found nearly $4 billion in spending beyond the estimated value of OTI’s citywide IT contracts — with purchase records that reveal almost nothing about what was actually bought.
For scale: PIT Crew, the Mamdani Administration’s flagship program for rebuilding how New Yorkers reach city services, costs $5 million. The city spends that on proprietary licenses roughly every three days. Its celebrated bet on building costs three days of its habit of renting.
An AI-assisted analysis by Databook.NYC, which processes nearly 100 city-produced open datasets, reaches the same conclusion from the ground up — agency by agency, contract by contract, there is real money on the table.
The easiest place to start counting is also the first reason to switch.
1. Save Money — and Change Every Negotiation
Start with the easy ones. The Department of Health pays $210,000 per two-year renewal for SurveyMonkey licenses — one agency, one survey tool. LimeSurvey, its open source equivalent, has no per-seat license at all. Multiply that pattern across 130-plus agencies each buying their own copy of the same category of tool and the number stops being a rounding error: seventeen agencies have each bought their own separate Microsoft Premier Support contract, several of them through different resellers.
And the savings start before a single system is replaced. Vendors price against your alternatives. A city that pilots LibreOffice in one bureau — that demonstrably can leave — walks into its next Microsoft negotiation as a different customer. The city’s three-year, $57 million citywide Microsoft agreement was negotiated by a buyer with no credible exit. Speaking open source fluently is worth money even where the city never switches.
The savings are real — and they are still the smallest of the six reasons.
2. Control Your Systems, Unlock Your Programs
Government programs run on software. The benefits portal is the benefits program; the scheduling system is the appointment policy. When the software is closed, the program is frozen in whatever shape the vendor shipped it — every new idea becomes a change order, priced by the only company that can implement it.
An administration that wants genuinely innovative programs — new ways to deliver childcare subsidies, small-business permits, housing applications — needs the legal and technical right to change the systems those programs run on. You can’t change the program if you can’t change the software. Open source is how a government keeps its policy options open.
3. Security You Can Verify
New York already runs a citywide Vulnerability Disclosure Program: outside researchers are invited to find flaws before attackers do. But for the vendor-purchased majority of city systems, the code is closed — nobody outside the vendor can check how well-built a system was to begin with. Open source extends the VDP’s logic from the city’s front doors to its foundations: trust by inspection, not by contract clause. Instead of taking a vendor’s word on security, the city — and the public — can check the work.
4. Make City Government a Career-Defining Place to Build
New York has one of the most educated technical workforces on earth — and almost none of it ever works on the systems eight million people depend on. That is not a talent problem; it is an access problem. Closed vendor systems have no place for an outside contributor to start.
Open source changes what a city technology job is. Your work is public, portable, citable — a commit history instead of a line on a résumé. The goal is a culture where a stint in New York City government technology is something the best engineers in the world seek out, the way the best lawyers clerk here and the best doctors do residencies here. The nearly 2,800 applications for PIT Crew’s first hiring round show the appetite. Open work is how you feed it.
5. Build Once, Use It 130+ Times
Paris has run its open source Lutèce platform since 2002 — it now powers more than 300 city services, from permits to participatory budgeting, and Paris’s own IT staff helped a Baltimore neighborhood nonprofit deploy it. One city’s software, reused across an ocean, because it was built to be reused.
Now look inward: New York is not one buyer, it is 130-plus agencies buying separately — seventeen of them with their own support contracts for the same vendor’s products. Software the city builds or adopts openly can be deployed by every agency that needs it, at no additional licensing cost. The first agency pays to solve the problem; every other agency gets the solution for free. No proprietary contract has ever worked that way.
6. The Center of Global Good Government
Every June, the world’s open source government movement meets at UN Headquarters — a subway ride from City Hall. Barcelona endorsed the UN Open Source Principles and became the reference point for cities worldwide. That role was New York’s for the taking, and still is.
A city that runs on open source doesn’t just serve its own residents better; it exports better government. NYC’s benefits screeners, permit systems and data tools — published openly — become starting points for Lagos, Jakarta and São Paulo, with the UN’s own networks as the distribution channel. No other city on earth has the UN in its backyard. Using that proximity to help cities everywhere govern better is a kind of leadership no one else can offer.
New York calls itself the center of the world. That carries a responsibility — to its residents, and to the world centered on it — to be a leader in good, open source government.