Commercial Open Source Software

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  Roberto Galoppini 4:22 pm on February 10, 2011 Permalink Reply
  Tags: assinform ( 2 ), CNIPA ( 4 ), digitpa ( 3 ), software reuse ( 2 )   

  The Italian Law on Digital Administration and Software Reuse

  The new Italian Law on Digital Administration (codename CAD) has been presented and thoroughly discussed yesterday afternoon at LUSPIO university with Andrea Simi, consultant of the Italian Minister of Innovation, Gianfranco Pontevolpe (DigitPA, formerly known as CNIPA, the National Center for IT in Public Administration) and Fabrizio Bianchi (Assinform, the Italian association of ICT companies).

  As anticipated in a previous post, in my opening greetings I made a very brief to the modifications made to reuse’s articles, eventually gathering feedback from the speakers.

  Let’s start by having a look at the original articles about software reuse:

  • art. 68 is about comparative analysis of software solutions, which must include evaluation of solutions already available;
  • art. 69, is specifically aimed at defining reuse, in particular it states that a public body that owns a software application is obliged to provide it (with no financial charge) to every other public body that request it for reuse;
  • art. 70, is about the institution of a catalog of applications owned by public bodies and then made available for reuse.

What’s new?

DigitPA is now asking public administrations to consider also software modules, bringing software modularity and its reuse under the spotlight.

Public administrations must inform DigitPA about the acquisition of IT solutions, in order to allow the latter to identify and share best-of-breed IT solutions (both from a technological and organizational perspective).

Looking at DigitPA website, actually a tiny excerpt of the previous website, is difficult to find information about many resources formerly available (e.g. the entire “Open Source” label is vanished), and it is hard to say how public administrations could communicate with DigitPA.

Reuse is always been rare, at best. Making it a reality requires good-will and infrastractures.