[ Thanks to Jan Stedehouder for this
link. ]
“It is not uncommon for governments to voluntarily head
for vendor lock-in. As a citizen, however, I have a direct stake in
my government basing its public procurement of IT on open
standards. This stake may be most evident for ‘civil ICT standards’
(Andy Updegrove), i.e., for standards that support access to
government information and exchanges with government such as
document formats (e.g., sustainable digital data).“However, I also have a standards-related stake in IT procured
for government-internal processes because, first, in practice
government-internal and -external IT processes cannot be separated.
Second, because of the increasing costs that accompany
vendor-lock-in.”