Sweden should bolster its competence in the use of open source and open standards in public administration, a study for the country’s Ministry of Enterprise and Innovation recommends. Public administrations should also be required to consider switching to free and open source alternatives, when procuring ICT solutions, and justify why they continue to use proprietary software.

These are three of the seven recommendations listed in the report by Ramboll Management Consulting, submitted to the ministry in late April. The other four are to:

Require an assessment of the total costs of ownership for larger ICT procurements;

Select national open standards (such as the Open Document Format ODF);

Disseminate best practices in the use of open source software;

Rid schools and universities of IT vendor lock-in by requiring the use of open source alternatives.

The ministry will not immediately publish the report, entitled “Internationell utblick; Öppen programvara inom statsförvaltningen” (International outlook: Open source in public administration). However, OSOR was given permission to make it available.

Blooming

The use of open source by Sweden’s public administrations provied widespread and increasing, the report summarises. Open source is implemented pragmatically - whenever it is the best solution. In general, open source is common in data centre environments, where it is used for web and application servers. Open source is more prevalent in central government organisations than in local administrations.

Examples include the National Heritage Board which switched its entire database environment to Postgresql and the Social Insurance Agency replaced a mix of proprietary server operating systems with Linux-based servers in 2014 and 2015.

There are a handful of projects where local and regional public administrations are working together on open source solutions. One example is SKLTP, a healthcare services platform. The report also points to Kivos, involving some 15 municipalities working on open source-based ICT solutions, and Open ePlatform, where 5 municipalities are developing an eGovernment services platform.