Digital Rights Network

Open source academy has
a story about Bristol City Council's switch to Star Office from Microsoft Office which it is estimated will save the council 60%. One of the key reasons for the switch along with the the lower total cost of ownership (TCO) was the desire to increase flexibility and avoid vendor lock-in in the long run:

Bristol City Council is set to save 60 per cent on software costs over five years following its decision to switch from Microsoft Office to Sun's StarOffice.

The decision was taken following a full evaluation of the costs and benefits of both platforms that included staff retraining, migration and support costs of switching the 5,500 users from a mixture of predominantly Microsoft systems to StarOffice.

...

Ultimately the decision was made to move over to Sun's StarOffice office suite. Not only was this a key win for the supporters of 'open source' software (OSS), it also closed the door to the dreaded vendor lock-in that plagues some of its 'closed source' counterparts. Such proprietary software is upgraded and updated regularly, requiring other vendors to have to continually play catch up to ensure continued interoperability. This places pressure on users to remain with the proprietary software and pay for upgrades frequently. OSS uses an Open Standard format which makes the development of compatible products simple and interoperability is guaranteed by design, thus reducing costs in the long term.