There was considerable furore recently when Newham Council decided to ‘go with Microsoft’ rather than an open source solution.

So this story about Bristol City Council deciding to use Star Office should be of considerable interest to local government IT trend spotters.

I originally got the story from the e-government bulletin - there is also a useful discussion on this gnu list .

Footnote: Many moons ago I was the web manager at Newham and can be credited in a small way with introducing open source software in the form of ht://dig search engine.

This ran for years as the search engine for both the internet and intranet and cost the council virtually nothing to install and maintain. It was set up in about two days and we used an old PC that was about to be binned. Interestingly the Newham council website no longer uses ht://dig but a commercial search engine. I wonder how much the costs differences were?