“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.
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.