Free software in Europe's public sector HOWTO Open Source in public administration

Disclaimers

The information and views set out in this presentation are those of the presenter and do not necessarily reflect the official opinion of the European Union. Neither the European Union institutions and bodies nor any person acting on their behalf may be held responsible for the use which may be made of this presentation.
Free software and open source software are synonyms

This talk

HOWTO open source in public administrations
Main implementations
Key policies
Expected benefits
What's missing?
But first: about OSOR

Open Source Observatory & Repository

More than 2000 news items, over 100 studies
Nearly 4000 government IT solutions (federated repositories)
EUPL

HOWTO open source in public administration

1. Make free & open source a task for the CIO

Licence costs are just the tip of the iceberg
Flexibility, scalability, speed
Take control, get rid of lock-in

Examples

National	UK GDS Open Source Lead, France CIO/DINSIC
Multi-municipal	DK OS2, Norway Kongsberg, Belgium Imio
Municipality	Germany Mayor of Munich
Region	Basque Country CIO
Organisation	Finland CIO Ministry of Justice

2. Make Moz://a Firefox the default browser

Provides leverage in dealing with IT suppliers
Break the lock-in to IE and proprietary technology
Available on all workstation operating systems

Examples

Supreme Court, Slovenia	Leipzig, Germany
Gendarmerie, France	Vienna, Austria
LNEC, Portugal	Fontaine, France
Schoten, Belgium	Munich, Germany
Zaragoza, Spain	Arnhem, Netherlands
Aarhus, Denmark	Basque Country, Spain

3. Make open standards mandatory

Be mindful of the definition
Take care of the selection process
Walk your talk

Examples

Open standards policy	United Kingdom
	France
	Netherlands
	Spain
Open standards list	Sweden

European Commission	Sharing and Reuse Framework
	EIF
	CAMSS

4. Help the organisation change

Small-scale pilots
Involve key-actors
Communicate, explain and motivate

Good	Bad

Nantes, France	Ede, Netherlands
Justice Ministry, Finland	Freiburg, Germany
Zaragoza, Spain	Duisburg, Germany
Defence Ministry, Italy	Pesaro, Italy
Bern, Switzerland	Emilia-Romagna region, Italy
Genoa, Italy	South Tyrol province, Italy
	Justice Ministry, Belgium
	Ostrava, Czech Republic

See also:
The Document Foundation

5. Engage the communities

Require open source skills (in-house and suppliers)
Optimise procurement to SMEs and sole proprietors
Promote, sponsor and facilitate open source development

Examples

Nantes (FR)	organises improvements to LibreOffice
Munich (DE)	main contributor to open source
DINSIC (FR)	hackathons

Main implementations

Workstations - full: operating systems and office productivity tools
Workstations - partial: office productivity tools
Annex: Other implementations

1. Operating systems & office productivity

Gendarmerie, France

72,000 Linux workstations

Open source desktop lowers TCO by 40%
An industrialised open source desktop is a powerful lever for IT governance
Being independent from proprietary software vendors is priceless

City of Munich, Germany

17,018 Linux and Libreoffice workstations

Contributed hundreds of bugfixes to open source projects, mostly through external service providers
One developer contributed 96 patches to LibreOffice, all of which are included in the most recent version, 5
Backporting 300+ patches to its version of LibreOffice (4.2.)

City of Zaragoza, Spain

1200 AZLinux and LibreOffice workstations (target 1800)

Migration project has very few resources
Main hurdle: MS Office macros and business applications tied to MS Office
Spin-off projects in universities and schools

2. Office productivity implementations

LibreOffice implemented in about half of all the ministries of France: about 500,000 workstations
LibreOffice implemented in Dutch central government, at between 40,000 and 100,000 workstations

Ministry of Defense, Italy

LibreOffice to be implemented on well over 100,000 workstations

The LibreDifesa project is projected to save EUR 26 to 29 million
The military is studying Linux on desktop
Already piloting the Zimbra email, calendaring and collaboration suite

Extremadura

10,000 pcs in healthcare organisations use Lingobex Salud
22,000 pcs in government offices will use Lingobex
93,000 school pcs and laptops run Linex

Toulouse

LibreOffice implemented on close to 10,000 workstations

Saving EUR 1 million
Free software is part of the city's digital policy
Free software is a driver of local economic development and employment.

Basque Country

LibreOffice implemented on over 8,000 workstations

Free software preferred policy
SALE: free and open source resource centre
About 300 Kznux Linux workstations

Police, Lithuania

LibreOffice implemented on 8,000 workstations

Saving EUR 1 million
The police have started testing of workstations running Linux
Once staff members realised the huge savings, they became open to change, and quickly adapted

Nantes, France

LibreOffice implemented on 5,000 workstations

Saving EUR 1,6 million now, and EUR 260,000 every year
Is earmarking 11% of these savings to help keep LibreOffice up to date, fix bugs and add new features
Biggest problem: MS Office macros and document interoperability

3. Annex: Other implementations

Public administrations now use free and open source for everything, everywhere

content management
document management
tasks management
database applications
eGovernment services
citizen participation
geoinformation systems
open data
software development

In the EU institutions

A fifth of software at EC is open source

European Parliament increases budget for EU-Fossa

European Commission to update its open source policy

EU: EUR 1 million for security audit of open source

EC recommends supporting open document format

European Parliament releases amendment software as open source

Two hundred ways to switch an EC directorate to open source

Key policies

France's Digital Law & rules on Public Sector Information
United Kingdom's Open Standards Policy
Bulgaria's amended eGovernment law, mandating a national 'GitHub'

Expected benefits

Autonomy, sovereignty, control
Increased efficiency, innovation
Growth of local, national & European software & services sector

What's missing?

Political awareness
Well-organised advocacy by civil groups and industry
Patches for procurement

Credits

Thanks to our European Commission for making this possible
Thanks to Clémentine Valayer, Daniel Melin, Eric Ficheux, Laurent Joubert, and many others for their valuable comments
Thanks to the herculean Debian, Emacs, Org-mode, and Reveal.js

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