Ah, how the mighty have fallen. In what must have been gross oversight, Red Hat is pitching proprietary software on its website under the banner of "No vendor lock-in." The way Red Hat and IBM make it appear, simply running one's software on an open platform like Linux magically removes the proprietary lock-in of the application.

"Vendor lock-in has become the primary problem for IT decisions in general and Free Software adoption in particular. It distorts the market and denies Free Software solutions equal competition on the merits. The problem has been that many lock-ins are invisible, for example reliance on proprietary protocols or needing to use certain document formats.

France’s ministry for education has migrated 2,500 servers across its 30 local education authorities to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, in line with the ministry's open-source investment strategy to avoid problems associated with vendor lock-in

One of the favorite arguments for free software is that it avoids lock-in to a particular manufacturer’s products. Something similar happens due to choice of programming language, though, which accounts for the sometimes-baffling project rivalries in the free software world.

If you aren't happy with the performance of your software, the solution should be simple: Switch to different software. In practice, however, jumping ship is seldom that easy, and vendor lock-in is a reality with which most IT departments are far too familiar.

The Liberal Democrats have hit out at the government's failure to use more open source software, three years after it pledged to avoid 'lock-in' to proprietary systems. The government published a policy document, 'Open Source Software: use within UK government' in 2004, promising to consider open source alongside proprietary products in IT procurements...

Just as a brief summary for those not familiar with the topic: A vendor of proprietary software can store data in closed, proprietary data formats. Thus, if you are a customer of that vendor it becomes very difficult for you to move to a competitor's product, for example if you like the features or price/performance of that offering better. Instead, the cost of moving, the risk of loosing all your data may be too great. You are 'locked in' to the current vendor...

The Icelandic government has released a policy on free and open source software. In short, the policy states that when buying software free and open source software should be considered on an equal footing with proprietary software, that software based on open standards shall be chosen, that lock-ins to specific vendors should be avoided (choosing free software is one means to achieve this), that bespoke or customized software shall be reusable (and free and open source software achieves this), and finally that students of Icelandic educational institutes shall have the opportunity to learn about and use free and open source software on a par with proprietary software.

This policy applies to all state institutions and organizations operated with public funds.

Although some companies and government agencies have embraced open source, the level of adoption in Singapore is still low by most counts, industry observers say.