The first part boils down to any civil servant: inflexibility and lower wages aren't for everyone, but it should not be impossible to attract talent intrinsically motivated to contribute to public cause. Especially when it's OSS.

The second part is a bit closer to the heresy angle: new public management forbids competing with "free market". Of course, many EU governments have always found and used all kinds of loopholes to support "independent enterprises" like railways, airlines, power companies and banks once they become too big to fail.

Maybe commodity open source software has reached that level too...