When I worked government contracting they had broad goals handed down which they must work toward without it being an explicit requirement. One of these goals? Get on top of an open source only stack for security, cost and future interoperability between other groups.
I worked on several projects where they were originally using Oracle or MarkLogic and we transitioned them to Postgres or various other, open source tech.
If the slow moving government is moving various projects away from Oracle, I would be shocked if some businesses weren't doing so as well. Now I don't know if moving away from proprietary is a trend or the more frequent than moving to them.
If you are allowed to and comfortable with it, could you share which country was that? Over the years I have looked at government projects in Western Europe, SE Asia and Australia, Europeans seem to be the ones that care the most about open source, while at the other end of the spectrum SE Asian governments are interested in it just as much as it lets them save money (much less because of "free as in freedom"). Australia seems to me kind of a mixed bag, it boasts about using Drupal because it's open source but I know that some projects are based on proprietary technology. Please note that much of the information I gathered is second-hand and may be inaccurate.
I can say from experience that in the U.S., the procurement people are definitely incentivized to look for solutions built on open standards and open source because of the ability for the government to have the option to not ever have to upgrade again, but to continue servicing this specific procurement (and this specific version) forever and ever and not be beholden to a specific vender or solution provider.
I've even seen cases where one company will sell a solution into the government and lose the maintenance contract the next year to some entirely different company who underbid the original provider -- and there's minimal slowdown in technical execution because the entire stack is open to some degree.
The government is starting to develop an allergy to vendor lock-in because of this.
United States. It may be a mixed bag as the agencies I worked with, well the groups within them I should say, were very, VERY against proprietary ANYTHING. I've never seen such a huge push back against software like Palantir. Funny thing? Almost every user I met LOVED just about all of the proprietary software and hated the contractor created, built on open source stacks, software.
Amazon is in the middle of a top-down migration off of Oracle. despite owning AWS, there are still a huge number of dependencies still running on Oracle.
I worked on several projects where they were originally using Oracle or MarkLogic and we transitioned them to Postgres or various other, open source tech.
If the slow moving government is moving various projects away from Oracle, I would be shocked if some businesses weren't doing so as well. Now I don't know if moving away from proprietary is a trend or the more frequent than moving to them.