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Story: Bristol Council says it can save £1m with open source

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Charles, you're jumping to (costly) conclusions.

Quote: "As everyone knows the licence cost is only a small part of the Total Cost of Ownership of any piece of software. All Open Source does is move the costs from Software to People costs (which is why its advocates like it because it means the organisation has to employ more of them)."

Actually the biggest part of Total Cost of Ownership is keeping clueless decison makers in place. And all Open Source does is to provide an alternative. If it turns out that a choice for an Open Source solution simply moved the costs from Software to People then that would be a manager (project leader) fault, wouldn't it?
Likewise, the other way around. Keeping a costly status quo solution in place just because.

"If Bristol have a mix of 123, Wordperfect and Office then how much could they save by standardising on Office."

How much could they save by standardising on Star Office, Open Office or even Notepad?
And might there be a reason for such diversity in the first place? Perhaps a best fit solution for a given department? With another department having another best fit solution? Or to put it in other terms: one-size-fits-all solutions are often initiated to make the IT department look good (on paper) but the true job of the IT department is to enable the rest of the company to do the best it can at acceptable costs. If that means diversity and decentralization then it's the IT department job to maintain exactly that. If your current IT department can't achieve that then perhaps something needs to be done about it's allocated resources, duties, responsibilites and authorizations. Including it's leadership. And including educating the brass about what really counts.

"Standardisation on Office would also allow them to apply its features to their specific business problems and that is where the true value is."

And their specific business problems are? You must know the answer to that given that you can already provide them a solution.

"If Linux and Star Office is so great how come Central Scotland Police installed in and are now moving back to Microsoft?"

If Microsoft is so great then how come so many organizations are considering alternatives?

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