The Crown Commercial Service has signed a deal with an open source software company called Collabora Productivity that will make the Libre Office software available across all government departments. Libre Office is a free version of Microsoft Office, a software package that the government spends millions in license fees to use. Collabora will provide a specially tailored version of Libre Office for free and will provide technical assistance and support.

The CCS deal is their latest move in a long running campaign to stamp out the public sector culture of mindlessly funnelling taxpayer money to big software companies and comes on the back of Government Digital Service’s victory in forcing Microsoft into supporting Open Document Formats. Libre Office uses the ODF standard and by making Microsoft support the format, CCS have opened the door for a seamless switch to free opensource software such as Libre Office. Don’t expect Microsoft to go down without a fight…