To coincide with EURO 2008, I’m embarking on a virtual European tour, taking a quick look at open source policies and deployment projects in the 16 nations that are competing in the tournament.

The statistics suggest that Austria is the worst teaming competing in EURO 2008, and despite a good performance in the opening game Austria predictably lost against Croatia.

Another statistic, this time from the 2002 FLOSS Report, is that 2.2% of open source developers at that time the report was written were Austrian. As the report stated: “regarding its small population size, Austria’s relative share in the open source community is however perceptibly high”.

That was the good news. The bad news was that “this considerable activity does however not mirror in the activity in the Austrian public sector. There are only very small projects going on.” Times change, and Austria is now home to some of the most celebrated public sector open source projects.

Key projects:
The 2003 announcement that Vienna was considering migrating 15,000 desktops to Linux made it one of the highest profile public sector open source deployments after Munich. By the time the initial study had been completed the total number of desktops had risen to 16,000, of which 7,500 were identified as suitable for migration to OpenOffice and 4,800 for migration to Linux.

A soft migration began in 2005 with the Wienux Debian-based distribution made available shortly afterwards for public- and private-sector adoption. As the roll-out continues Wienux has moved to Kubuntu and the total number of desktops has increased past 20,000. In the meantime, migration of the remaining Windows machines to Vista is also being considered while it was recently reported that Vista, rather than Wienux, will be used for a number of school desktops due to applications requiring the use of IE.

Other Austrian public-sector open source projects include Salzburg’s Linux server migration while the Ministry of Education has started distributing open source software packages Desktop4Education (D4E) and Server4Education (S4E) with the support of Sun.

Key polices:
All these projects appear to have taken place without a formal policy encouraging open source adoption. In fact, the Austrian Ministry of the Interior was one of the earliest adopters of Microsoft’s shared source program.

Key vendors:
The Austrian open source IT industry boasts project and portfolio management vendor Onepoint as well as Kinamu, which produces ERP and CRM software based on a combination of SAP and SugarCRM Professional. Meanwhile VDEL is pushing Linux as part of its services offerings and teamed up with IBM in March to sell Linux PCs in Eastern Europe. As Chris notes in the comments, other open source vendors include Cubit, Linbit, strg.at, Proclos, and Lizenzfrei.

And another thing:
In August 2007 Eric Raymond wrote: “the theoretical roots of the modern open-source movement are deeply intertwined with Austrian economics and libertarian political theory.”

As always we welcome your input. If you have examples of open source adoption in Austria that we’ve overlooked, please leave a comment below. For more stops on the European tour, see this post.