Open Source Government Policies
The Italian Constitutional Court recently ruled that the preference for open source software is legal, while taking out two articles from the original regional Piedmont law, actually found to interfere with the Italian copyright law and the Italian constitution.
Italian free software activists welcomed the court’s decision, others put a different interpretation. I am not a lawyer nor a constitutionalist, and I didn’t make my mind yet on this, but I took the chance to have a look at what happens around the world.
Trying to put government open source policies into a worldwide perspective, I found some interesting source analyzing yearly the situation (2006, 2007, 2008). Apparently the last year very few initiatives have been started (23), a sign that probably the vast majority of nations already have considered this option.
More interesting to notice is that the number of advisory initiatives approved equals the number of initiatives establishing a preference (56), a number big enough to start to draw some conclusions.
Has any analist firm ever had look into that?
After reading this article about “government open source licensing“, a topic that might get hotter when it comes to move from writing laws to make them enforceable and effective.
Roberto Galoppini, 
Code ownership the key for government open source | Open Source | ZDNet.com 3:48 pm on April 12, 2010 Permalink
[…] Galoppini (right)Â writes that the Italian Constitutional Court has ruled legal a preference for open source software by the […]
M. Fioretti 6:23 am on April 13, 2010 Permalink
Hi Roberto,
here is some other information I collected about the decision of the Italian Constitutional court. More exactly, I collected some explanation of why a part of the decision may be a symptom that there may be general problems in OTHER Italian regional laws regarding Open Source software and Open Standards in Public Administrations:
http://stop.zona-m.net/node/135
Roberto Galoppini 9:26 am on April 13, 2010 Permalink
Ciao Marco.
I hope at some point someone will invest time towards analyzing free software laws’ effectiveness, eventually helping us to draw some conclusions.
All in all supporting public administrations to better understand licensing and for writing tenders to me seems a pragmatic way to promote open source software for real.