The study suggests that software developed for and owned by public administrations should be issued under an open source licence. It also recommends that a software pooling facility should be made available to EU Member States, to provide quality guarantees and to help resolve questions of liability. According to the study, these are the two issues that currently inhibit the sharing of e-government developments.
However, the report recommends a step-wise implementation of the pooling facility, “since sharing competence and good practices is more urgent than sharing software.”
The report says:
“More that simply providing software, the pooling facility should thus make available expertise and help create a community of developers, users and policy makers, providing opportunities for increased cooperation, notably in software development and testing.”
The cost of e-government in Europe is estimated to increase to €6.6 billion (28%) in 2002. The study suggests that sharing e-government tools could lead to “across-the-board improvements in efficiency of the European public sector.”
The findings of the IDA study were discussed at a specialist hearing held in Brussels last month, and received broad acceptance.
The recommendations of the “Pooling Open Source Software” study are available from the IDA web site.