Adoption of free and open-source software by public institutions
The use of free software instead of proprietary software can give institutions better control over information technology. Therefore, a growing number of public institutions started a transition to free-software solutions. This does not only grant independence but can address the often argued need for public access to publicly funded developments. In addition, this is the only way that public services can ensure that citizen data is handled in a trustworthy manner since non-free software wouldn't allow total control over the employed functions of the needed programs.
The Government of Kerala, India, announced its official support for free/open-source software in its State IT Policy of 2001. This was formulated after the first-ever free-software conference in India, "Freedom First!", held in July 2001 in Thiruvananthapuram, the capital of Kerala, where Richard Stallman inaugurated the Free Software Foundation of India. Kerala's Government's support for Free Software in 2001 is perhaps the earliest instance of a Government supporting the use of Free Software. Under the IT@School project the government of Kerala has adopted free and open sourced software for the schools.
The National Gendarmerie announced in March 2009 that it will totally switch to Ubuntu by 2015. The Gendarmerie has adopted OpenOffice.org, Firefox and Thunderbird.
The German City of Munich in 2003 announced its intention to switch from Microsoft Windows NT-based operating systems to an open-source implementation of SuSE Linux, In June 2004 after a pilot project run by SuSE Linux and IBM there was a final approval for the migration. On 14 April 2005 the city decided to migrate to Debian from a commercial Linux distribution. An adoption rate of 20% was achieved by 2010.
Schwäbisch Hall
migrated its 400 workstations to Linux in late 2002. The factors were cost, better security, escape from the treadmill of vendor-driven upgrades.
In September, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts announced its formal adoption of the OpenDocument standard for all Commonwealth entities. In February 2009, the United States White House moved its website to Linux servers using Drupal for content management. In August 2016, the United States government announced a new federal source-code policy. This policy mandates that at least 20% of custom source code developed by or for any agency of the federal government must be released as open-source software. In addition, the policy requires that all source code be shared between agencies. The public release is under a three-year pilot program and agencies are obliged to collect data on this pilot to gauge its performance. The overall policy aims to reduce duplication, avoid vendor 'lock-in', and stimulate collaborative development. A new website provides "an online collection of tools, best practices, and schemas to help agencies implement this policy", the policy announcement stated. It also provides the "primary discoverability portal for custom-developed software intended both for Government-wide reuse and for release as OSS". As yet unspecified OSS licenses will be added to the code. The US Chief Information Officer Tony Scott, co-author of the policy, blogged "This is, after all, the People's code. Explore it. Learn from it. Improve it. Use it to propel America's next breakthrough in innovation."
The government of Brazil migrated from Microsoft Windows to Linux. In 2006, the Brazilian government also encouraged the distribution of cheap computers running Linux throughout its poorer communities by subsidizing their purchase with tax breaks.
In April 2008, Ecuador passed a similar law, Decree 1014, designed to migrate the public sector to Libre Software.
Peru
In 2005, the Government of Peru voted to adopt open source across all its bodies. The 2002 response to Microsoft's critique is available online. In the preamble to the bill, the Peruvian government stressed that the choice was made to ensure that key pillars of democracy were safeguarded: "The basic principles which inspire the Bill are linked to the basic guarantees of a state of law."
In 2004, a law in Venezuela went into effect, mandating a two-year transition to open source in all public agencies. As of June 2009 this ambitious transition is still under way.
