I've lost count of the amount of times I've seen Oracle products bought based off the back of Oracle's keen sales people overstating the value of their post sales support.

Plus since there's so many redundancies happening in local government, they don't like train and retain skilled in house staff who would have been able to offer the same level of support. So 3rd party support is seen as more reliable than in house.

Lastly, many project managers push for such contracts because it means they can deny responsibility (ie if Oracle fucks up, they can blame Oracle. But if the system goes down and they're responsible for their own support, then the buck stops at the project managers). So you often get project managers push for such contracts just out of laziness.

There might be a case that this legislation might see more contracts signed with open source vendors who provide support, but local governments will always still have the argument that MS / Oracle are big trusted names where as a less known (outside of the world of IT) open source vendor may not be able to provide the scale of service that the government wants (complete BS of course, but all to often these decisions are made by project managers who know jack shit about IT)