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Helsinki is moving to open source to avoid vendor lock in. Here's one politician's explanation: https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=fi&tl=en&u=h...

This is awesome, I hope more do this!

Now if they only applied this philosophy to their huge hundred-million-euro healthcare information system project currently in the last stages of the bidding competition [1]. It will in all likelihood be a completely closed, monolithic, proprietary system and, as far as I know, no attempt is done in the specifications to avoid vendor lock-in. It will probably become a nice cashcow for whichever megacorp wins the project.

[1] http://www.hel.fi/hki/apotti/fi/Apotti-hanke/English

There's a lot of open source software for governments in the US but darn few avail themselves of it.

http://wiki.civiccommons.org/Civic_Software

http://opencityapps.org/

A fair number of `Open Data` municipal initiatives seem to end with a single SQL dump or two handed over to a commercial vendor (such as socrata) for display. Not much of substance, but just enough for an elected official to say "see look, I made us an open data city!"

My favorite open source City application is http://cityofasheville.github.io/simplicity-ui/#/search

It's the friendliest version of open data I've seen.

City of Helsinki