George Osborne gave a talk this morning to a crowd of mainly public sector geeks assembled by the RSA – the notable exceptions that Guido spotted being Bryan Appleyard, Adriana Cronin-Lukas, the Doughty Street crowd and the WebCameron team.

Osborne banged the drum for the government switching to Open Source and, although he didn’t say it explicitly, abandoning Microsoft. The comparitive imagery is very potent, the Tories are the Google party (“Do no evil”) to New Labour’s Microsoft party (“Evil Corp.”).

Online libertarians have a gut suspicion of the Microsoft/New Labour alliance, when Big Software meets Big Government one thing you can be sure about – we’re going to get screwed financially. So Osborne is obviously hanging out with the right kind of geeks nowadays.