Why can't local government and open source be friends?

If you don’t get that far in the linked article, they mention a new group—UKGovOSS [1]—that have produced an interesting report [2] on the attitudes towards open source in local government.

[1] http://ukgovoss.org/

[2] http://ukgovoss.org/2009/08/06/open-or-closed-report/

For the state I live in, I find there is little knowledge of linux/unix in state and local governments. This quickly narrows the playing field to Windows and to proprietary from there.