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Open source software like SE Linux and Beowulf obviously are fattening the government, as you well know.

The government needs an IT product. It can be done it three ways I can think of:

They buy it COTS, money goes to software companies
They make it themselves: money goes to public employees
Contract the making of it: money goes to contractors

In all of those three cases, your tax dollars are being spent, we just shift around who's getting the money. Sure we can claim "smaller government" in number of employees if we contract, but those contracted employees are still being paid by the taxpayers in the end. It's only a shell game that obviously duped you.

Now here's an interesting thing with #3. Anything the government creates is automatically public domain. So, technically, while the government may contribute to open source, those parts are public domain.

However, if the government hires contractors to program open source for #2, it can be assigned the copyright and really release it under an open source license. Thus the contractors get the money instead of it going to government employees, as is your preference due to your love of corporate welfare.

Don't get me wrong, contracting is fine. But you have said that contracing to Cray (and Cray is always expensive, especially back then) is better than some government employees (although they may have been contractors, we don't know) assembling some available boxes into a cluster. You prefer massive money be given to industry over a small amount of money internally spent to achieve the same result.

The closed source version of #2 is exactly the same, only it has some disadvantages compared to open source that is freely distributed:

If the contractor wishes to base the product on another product, it must pay money to license it, money that the taxpayers pay in the end. No need to pay with open source.
The taxpayers will pay for any improvements to the product after it is finished. With open source, they get can improvements free from the community.
The taxpayers will never directly get to use what they paid for. With open source, they need only download it.

The money saved by the taxpayers on open source (=smaller government) only takes money away from the COTS software makers, and puts it back in the pockets of the people. But you prefer welfare to Microsoft. Do you have a stock interest in that?