On Deceber 2010 the european commission published a call for tender of the value of 200K EUR to help reducing the risk of proprietary technology lock-in practices in public procurement:
Investigate the current public procurement practices in the EU and Member States (also at regional and municipal level) and provide recommendations for the type of help that the public procurers need in order to be able to procure ICT that promotes efficiency and reduces vendor lock-in by referring to standards. The study is part of the implementation of 'Digital Agenda for Europe, action 23'.
Here's the tender details: http://ted.europa.eu/udl?uri=TED:NOTICE:67447-2011:TEXT:EN:HTML
Call is open till April 15 2011, with April 8 being last possible date for requesting more documents on the matter.
--strk;
() Free GIS & Flash consultant/developer /\ http://strk.keybit.net/services.html