Second news highlight on linked page: >New York City and Microsoft Partner to Modernize City's IT Infrastructure - Mayor Bloomberg and Microsoft CEO Steve Ball

Second news highlight on linked page: >New York City and Microsoft Partner to Modernize City's IT Infrastructure - Mayor Bloomberg and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announce first of its kind partnership to keep New York City at the cutting edge of technological innovation while saving taxpayer dollars. Long term licensing of proprietary software somehow does not seem like the best way to save tax payer dollars. I wonder how many thousands of IT departments and millions of computers exist across federal, state, and local levels? It seems likely that either the Department of Energy, NSA, or DoD already maintains their own Linux or BSD distribution that could be used to run open office on every government computer in the country for free. Even if you are a Windows fan, it seems hard to justify spending tax dollars on that many licenses for government use.