It's not difficult to see how LibreOffice costs more than Microsoft office. Lets imagine that the average city worker gets paid $60,000 per year and works 1500

It's not difficult to see how LibreOffice costs more than Microsoft office. Lets imagine that the average city worker gets paid $60,000 per year and works 1500 hours per year, (35 hour work week, 4 weeks paid vacation) or $40 per hour. A copy of Office on newegg costs $349 which is pretty much the highest price anyone will ever pay for MS Office. A city probably pays closer to $50 to $100. Lets imagine a day of training for LibreOffice, and a day of downtime over a year due to incompatibilities (lets assume that there are no bugs in Libre Office and the incompatibilities are purely due to MS's monopolistic practices), 14 hours times $40 is $560 and we haven't even paid for the instructor for the training or the IT guy to fix the problems.