[roedog]

The last paragraph of the story talks about how "the German city of Freiburg voted to end the city's experiments with a free and open source office suite. In that city, the IT department had been struggling for years to support both an decade-old proprietary office suite as well as an outdated version of OpenOffice. Increasing frustration by the city's civil staff prompted the city board to revert to use only proprietary office solutions"

The conclusion I draw it that any kind of software adoption depends on how well IT departments support it. In addition to lobbying budget conscious city councils it is also necessary to evangalize and train the government IT workers.