Nice, that echoes the recent french CADA decision that recognizes
software source code as a "publicly discloseable document", that just was validated by an administrative court:
http://www.april.org/le-tribunal-administratif-valide-lavis-de-la-cada-les-c... (sorry no translation yet)
On the 1st of April (no, that's not a joke), the tax administration will
release the source code of the tax calculation software they wrote, and even organize a hackathon around it.
http://www.nextinpact.com/news/98981-le-fisc-ouvrira-code-source-son-calcula...
François.
That's great!
This also echoes active work done in Sweden.
The parliamentary committees of the Swedish government is currently in the process of finalising a statement of opinion regarding the use of open standards and open source software in government agencies [1,2].
The analysis leading up to the statement of opinion was conducted in 2009 by the Swedish Government Official Reports (SOU) [3,4] agency. Below follows a set of extracts from the conducted analysis.
"Myndigheterna ska i första hand välja öppna standarder och alltid överväga öppen programvara." [5]
Which roughly translates to:
"Government agencies should if possible use open standards and always consider using open source software." [5]
and
"Den offentliga förvaltningens e-tjänster bör i så stor utsträckning som möjligt bygga på öppna standarder samt använda sig av programvara som bygger på öppen källkod och lösningar som stegvis frigör förvaltningen från beroendet av enskilda plattformar och lösningar." (SOU 2009:86, page 163) [6].
Which roughly translates to:
"The government agencies IT-services should to the extent possible be build using open standards and use open source software and solutions to gradually liberate the agencies from reliance on individual platforms and solutions." (SOU 2009:86, page 163) [6].
The report also highlights work from other EU-member countries, in particular the Netherlands work on "Open Standards for ICT Procurement" [7].
Thank you for pushing this topic and working hard to find a solution fit for collaboration and sharing of information and knowledge in this day and age.
Kind regards - Robin Eklind
[1]: http://www.riksdagen.se/sv/Dokument-Lagar/Forslag/Motioner/mot-2015162056-pp... [2]: http://data.riksdagen.se/fil/BC38DEF7-C5D8-49FE-A294-81344FE0B691 [3]: http://www.sou.gov.se/ [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statens_offentliga_utredningar [5]: http://www.edelegationen.se/Publikationer/Betankanden/Tredje-generationens-e... [6]: http://www.edelegationen.se/Documents/Remisser,%20bet%C3%A4nkanden%20mm/SOU_... [7]: https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/community/open_standards_ict/topic/netherlands-o...