Caught short with proprietary GIS

The Cabinet of the South African Government in February 2007 approved a policy on Open Source and Interoperability in Government. I've heard details recently of two GIS projects where Government departments in South Africa have been caught short, which would not have happened were this policy implemented. Firstly, the GIS-based Working for Water management information system. I started work on this in 1997 while working at the South African ESRI distributor. Naturally initial versions were based around ArcView 3 and Avenue. Development and deployment continued after I left in 1999. A switch of Government IT contractor a few years back resulted in the GIS firm's contract ending. The result? The Department of Water Affairs was left without the source code of the system and so had to employ the new contractors to rebuild it from scratch. It was probably due for a refactoring anyway... This time around they have apparently retained ownership of the source code. All that's left for them to do under the new policy is to release it under an Open Source licence and all the benefits that brings. My second case is of the very popular SA Explorer, produced by the Municipal Demarcation Board with Norwegian funding. It is (or rather was) a MapObjects-based viewer that came with a mountain of free spatial data, the basic set for any GIS user in South Africa. The reason it's discontinued after version 4 is that funding dried up and the Demarcation Board couldn't get the source code from the contractor who put it together. If it were open source it would still be alive and kicking and updated by the community. I'd like to build up a collection of case studies so if you know of any other examples please add them in a comment.