err actually I think you (lib dems) have a lot more to worry about than some pious (used in its political sense here) belief by OS Zellots and hobby programmers that some how Open Office is a better solution than MS Office for a huge (largely non technical) user base.
The cost of a MS licence is so tiny when compared to the cost of employing some one - and when you factor in the cost of retraining it makes very good sense - whose hospitals or schools would you close to pay for all this.
Where governments are concerned, MS Office licences can be huge and will always be more expensive than free. They will always always be more restrictive too than free software, by definition.
I agree that a licence by itself won't be the biggest expense a government will have, but the sleazy insidious contracts that they are normally bundled with are the most dangerous aspects licensed software. One example: why do so many government institutions still use IE6? It's because of the eye-watering expenses they're obliged to pay to upgrade their own systems.
This type of type of contractual bondage must end. Especially when it comes to tax payers money. Unnecessary licences for sub standard MS software comes out of the same purse as that used to pay for life saving operations. It's always worth bearing this in mind.
Its not cheaper if you have to retain a lot of people - and Open office is not well liked by ordinary users "its shit" was one comment by a coworker at my last place
And look at any advert for a Govenment IT project its always to many chiefs and not enough experianced devlopers.
IE6 lock in is due to cheap and shoddy work by the "outsourced" developers and a lack of technical nous (incopentance being more blunt) in the specification stage PPI has a lot to answer for.
This is about defending the coalition agreement, which has aspirations about open source software and open data in it that come straight out of the Lib Dem policy book.
Admittedly Europe wasn't (and OSS/Open Standards wouldn't be) the most electorally-useful topic to pick a fight on, but since when have Lib Dems ever done anything the easy way.
It's our policy, I and some of our voters care about it, and we won the concession off the tories during the coalition negotiation. That should be enough to make us fight for it, when the time comes.
The cost of a MS licence is so tiny when compared to the cost of employing some one - and when you factor in the cost of retraining it makes very good sense - whose hospitals or schools would you close to pay for all this.