Free/Libre Open Source Adoption in the Public Sector: Current State and Lessons Learnt

Many studies stated that the adoption of Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) inside public organisations can be beneficial to citizens. The introduction inside an organisation is not trivial, and comprises many technological, organisational, individual and environmental aspects. In this paper, we analyse the current state of adoption of FLOSS by means of an exploratory case study methodology. We propose a multi-level framework to analyse the adoption process deriving from innovation adoption theory. We apply such framework to organisations participating previously to an European project to get an understanding of the evolution and current state of adoption. From the case studies, we derived a level of diffusion that mostly didn’t extend to other FLOSS technologies or additional activities inside the organisations. Additionally, stakeholders involved consider critical the governmental rules and the attitude towards change of the management for a successful initiation of the adoption process.