“Ministers are looking at saving tens of millions of pounds a year by abandoning expensive software produced by firms such as Microsoft. Some £200m has been spent by the public sector on the computer giant’s Office suite alone since 2010. But the Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude believes a significant proportion of that outlay could be cut by switching to software which can produce open-source files in the "open document format" (ODF), such as OpenOffice and Google Docs.”Rather than taking M$’s office suite as the default and paying forever whatever M$ wants, the government of the UK is thinking that (really) open standards and FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software) is the right way to do IT. With thinking like that it’s only a matter of time before M$’s client OS gets the chop.
See UK government plans switch from Microsoft Office to open source.
