NZ's Ministry of Justice has just released a draft version of its Open Source Discussion Paper.

Highlights include:

"OSS has been dominant in IT infrastructure for years. GNU/Linux and various flavours of BSD UNIX have
dominated the Internet, perl and PHP have been the predominant development languages of the WWW, and
Apache actually has expanded its early 80% market share among web servers. All of those products are OSS."

"This document was initially composed in industry standard ASCII text file format, using the proprietary tool Notepad. It was then formatted using the open source software package OpenOffice 2.0.2, and made available digitally in the open standards Open Document Format (ODF) and Portable Document Format (PDF)."

"We see tremendous opportunity (sic) to deploy OSS widely within the Ministry to improve stability and application development responsiveness whilst reducing costs."

"In summary, the adoption of OSS can lead to a more stable, supportable, and cost-effective IT environment, and should be pursued for pragmatic reasons."

"Given two equivalent packages, one open and one proprietary, the OSS one would be the preferable choice for reasons of better supportability and lower lifecycle cost."

Looks like a very good start - and almost effusive about open source software adoption in government.