For anyone who still doubts of the dynamism of open source adoption by government, the European Commission is listing the most recent deployments on its Open Source Observatory web site. This site lists a number of very interesting implantation case studies.

I would for example recommend reading Building a market for FLOSS: The OSOSS project in the Netherlands that details how the Netherlands is helping ministries and municipalities to make their IT strategies more open. Its goal is to create a level playing field for open source solutions, and to boost the local economy and the Netherlands’ capability for IT innovation.
This kind of initiative is essential for the autonomy of public services, but also to improve their efficiency, their productivity and the quality of their services.

Also interesting is the News section of the European Commission’s web site, updated daily. You will for example learn that South Africa has adopted ODF (Open Document Format) or that the Swedish Police has decided to implement MySQL. The number of such announcements does not decrease, despite rumors that try to make believe that open source deployments are declining. These rumors, spread by several proprietary vendors, rely on statistics about servers that they try to apply to the market as a whole… This disinformation is not worth spending too much time on: at Talend, we know that the growth isn’t slowing down! We have just opened new offices in Germany and hired a new VP of Sales Operations in the US. I know several proprietary vendors who would be more than happy with this kind of growth – which actually symbolizes their own decline!

Historically, government agencies (especially in Europe) have been early adopters of open source. Their commitment has helped us improve our offerings and gain credibility by proving that open source solutions integrate well in a complex environment, while offering a great performance-price ratio. Today, it’s our turn to support them, by providing them with software and services that will enable them to successfully transition to e-government. With always the same goal: end user satisfaction.

Bertrand