The other 90% of these initiatives, on the other hand, are genuine attempts to reduce costs with the added benefit of breaking vendor lock-in and thus reducing costs down the line while increasing decision autonomy.

I have no idea who suggested it, but, if I were a UK citizen, I would prefer the money that comes from my taxes to be diverted to companies that create more jobs in the UK than they create in Redmond, or Bangalore.

That's the issue that many countries deal with, do you purchase a sub standard product from a local vendor to keep money in the local economy or do you go for the most effective product anywhere.

The big problem for them will be that it's fine to give all these people OpenOffice but they have the extra effort of also saving it into an Office format most times they have to interact with people outside there business. Then there could be translation problems.

In this specific case, it's the choice between the most effective product and the one with biggest marketing budget.

Also, in this case, companies wishing to do business with the government should adhere to government norms. If the government dictates OOo-compatible file formats, then OOo-compatible it will be.

This isn't even that, this is a single suggestion on a public forum asking 600,000 civil servants in the UK for suggestions of lowering costs. Using 'UK officials' to describe these 600,000 people is absurd. If you could that would be 1% of the UK population would could speak for the UK. No.

This isn't costed, nor is it an official stance. This is from a total random person. It is statistically far more likely to be a secretary or janitor than a head of IT.

In other words it is a TOTAL non-story. It is, to be frank, very, very bad journalism.

It is the equivalent of reporting that all Nike sports shoes are potentially going to be made in the US because someone put a note in a random store's suggestion box that they should.

It was bound to have been posted by someone. I'm guessing that switching to single sheet loo roll is also somewhere in the suggestions.

Did you bother reading the entire article? Yes, it was one of many ideas, but the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, was pushing for open source. Not some random secretary or janitor.

I think you need to read the article again, I assume you're talking about:

“We need to follow the example of businesses all over the world and take advantage of open-source technology,” Osborne wrote in The Times of London in February 2009.

You mean the quote from Feb 2009? A full year before they got into power? No commitment, no oversight, no civil servants actually assessing the plan, just a Shadow Chancellor musing about something.

So still a total and utter non-story.

You need to learn to read articles more objectively, see what they're really saying.

This one is saying a list of suggestions from the 600k civil servants included using OSS (big whoop, meaningless). George Osborne said while he was Shadow Chancellor we should take advantage of OSS (note no mention of MS or OSes).

That this got twisted into "Dump Microsoft, Use Linux to Save Money, U.K. Officials Suggest" is a travesty. No officials have said anything resembling this and they certainly didn't target MS.

... and why is that bad? or rather, who is it bad for?

I never commented on whether it was good or bad. I merely pointed out a fact that isn't obvious at first glance to everyone when they encounter a story of this kind.