It does not look that bad actually. Your list lacks Oracle, Microsoft technologies to really complain about inefficient usage of public money. I would love if my country used open source more.
source: I used to work for local government
I've lost count of the amount of times I've seen Oracle products bought based off the back of Oracle's keen sales people overstating the value of their post sales support.
Plus since there's so many redundancies happening in local government, they don't like train and retain skilled in house staff who would have been able to offer the same level of support. So 3rd party support is seen as more reliable than in house.
Lastly, many project managers push for such contracts because it means they can deny responsibility (ie if Oracle fucks up, they can blame Oracle. But if the system goes down and they're responsible for their own support, then the buck stops at the project managers). So you often get project managers push for such contracts just out of laziness.
There might be a case that this legislation might see more contracts signed with open source vendors who provide support, but local governments will always still have the argument that MS / Oracle are big trusted names where as a less known (outside of the world of IT) open source vendor may not be able to provide the scale of service that the government wants (complete BS of course, but all to often these decisions are made by project managers who know jack shit about IT)
However it doesn't excuse people working on a web site funded by the taxpayer using it as a technology playground.
Where as developing stuff in house means that you're employing significantly cheaper labour (namely, the rubbish salaries that most get in the public sector vs the private sector) and as a bonus the cost is more likely going to stay within the UK (ie you're not paying multinational companies nor their overseas consultants (Oracle was particularly bad for this as they dumped our stuff in a US data centre and our support contacts were all living somewhere in eastern Europe. So very little - if anything - provided was UK based).
Sadly our government doesn't seem to understand about doing anything in between - or at least not that I observed when I used to work there. It was either entirely bespoke or entirely bought, developed and set up by some overpriced conglomerate (or worse yet, outsourced completely). So going by the trends that I've witnessed, I'd rather the technology playgrounds just so long as they remain developed in house.
Just because the organisation uses open-source software doesn't excuse them from public and professional scrutiny.
An MP spending £1645 on a duck house under expenses got a lot more attention than this little bit of waste. Just redressing the balance.
Efficiency is a major problem in government. Government should have a low financial impact on society where possible. A government entering a market with an already solved problem is wasteful at best. If they'd contributed time to Nginx or mod_proxy then they would have a net positive social effect.
But they didn't. They built an inferior product at great cost to the taxpayer.
Is this some sort of Markov-chained free-market/El-Reg-at-its-most-prolix/libertarian experiment in satire? Well played!
Various governments are already throwing money at Open Document Foundation (France, Germany come to mind) to support LibreOffice so why shouldn't we throw a few quid at nginx/apache?
Or should we go and write our own office suite?