"I think all of them should be using open source software, for both budget reasons and in principle." For the budget, you're not calculating the entire equatio

"I think all of them should be using open source software, for both budget reasons and in principle." For the budget, you're not calculating the entire equation, mate. You're forgetting how much the time of an employee costs. Let's assume a single user license for Office costs $100 dollars (I'm not sure how much it costs, but I think that's ballpark). Now, if your employee is used to Office Word, and using the more streamlined MS Office provides him with a 0.5% increase in productivity over Open Office, how much money is that each year?? Lets give this guy a yearly salary of $45,000 and calculate 0.5 * 0.01 * 45000 = 225. => 0.5% of his work time is worth $225 each year. Oh, wow, that MS Office package just paid for itself in less than six months! and that's by estimating only 0.5% work increase. And trust me, a lot of people spend their entire work day using Excel, and having used both Excel and Calc I can GUARANTEE you the increase in productivity is much, much higher than half a percent (for perspective, 0.5% of an 8 hour workday is 2.4 minutes) Don't forget get this when you're arguing about how to spend taxpayer money. There's a reason why big companies / institutions pay for expensive software; it's actually cheaper in the long run!