"It is not uncommon for governments to voluntarily head for vendor lock-in. As a citizen, however, I have a direct stake in my government basing its public procurement of IT on open standards. This stake may be most evident for 'civil ICT standards' (Andy Updegrove), i.e., for standards that support access to government information and exchanges with government such as document formats (e.g., sustainable digital data).
"However, I also have a standards-related stake in IT procured for government-internal processes because, first, in practice government-internal and -external IT processes cannot be separated. Second, because of the increasing costs that accompany vendor-lock-in."
