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.

Turkey kept its hopes of qualifying for the knockout stages of EURO 2008 alive with a last-minute victory over hosts Switzerland last night and now faces a winner-takes-all final group game against the Czech Republic on Sunday.

When it comes to open source software adoption, details of public and private deployments are thin on the ground, and we are indebted to Erkan Tekman, Pardus project manager, for contributing his insight into open source adoption in Turkey (see below).

Pardus is Turkey’s own Linux distribution developed by Turkey’s National Institute of Electronics and Cryptology (UEKAE), an affiliate of the Scientific and Technological Research Council (TUBITAK).

The Pardus project has contributed open source-specific efforts to the government Action Plans for e-conversion, including the preparation of an evaluation and migration guides, and is also working on migration pilots, and on creating a proof of concepts for open source use in public administrations.

Meanwhile, there is a wealth of information about community-level open source involvement. If you were wondering what the attitude of Turkish hackers is towards free and open source software, and how that compares to the attitude of hackers within the European Union, you are in luck. This MIT report (PDF) tells you everything you need to know. Additionally, if you’re interested in which projects are responsible for the localization of open source projects into Turkish, look no further than this report (also PDF).

Key projects:
There are sporadic examples of Turkish open source projects. In August 2007 Turkey’s Military Recruitment Division, which is part of the Ministry of Defense, announced that it was switching to Pardus Linux on all of its 4,500 desktops and more than five hundred servers.

Pardus is also being used by Turkish Radio and Television Supreme Council as part of its digital television archive and analysis project.

Meanwhile CentOS is used along with Apache and MySQL to power Yerelnet, a web site designed to encourage collaboration between local governments. Other early adepter success stories include Manisa Health Directorate, Petrol-Is, and Neziroglu Motors, all of which are using Pardus Linux.

While there are few examples of Turkish open source deployments to date there is reason to believe that may will be more in the future thanks to the fact that the Ministry of Education is teaching students to use and understand open source software as well as Windows as part of the IT curriculum.

The view from the ground:
“TUBITAK has given a great kickstart to open source in Turkey, by housing Pardus project for the last three plus years. Now that Pardus is out of its infancy, expect to hear much more from this corner of the world. We are heading to a more widespread adoption in Turkey and are ready for global competition as well…”
Erkan Tekman, project manager, Pardus.
(With thanks to Erkan for his contribution to this post).

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