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.

According to statistics presented by Roberto Galoppini, 2.4% of visitors to SourceForge are from Poland, a statistic which serves its purpose of being both interesting and pointless at the same time.

Also statistically meaningless in terms of open source adoption, but nonetheless interesting is the news that Polish deputy prime minister, Waldemar Pawlak, is a user of PHProjekt.

Tom Foremski reported late last year that Poland is poised to play an increasing role in the IT industry, and not just as a source of cheap developers. With an educated workforce and strong science background, it is one of a number of European countries that sees the IT industry as a way to grow the local economy.

Key projects:
Poland boasts a number of active open source adoption projects, including Gdansk which began migrating its mail servers from Windows NT/Exchange to Red Hat/Postfix in 2001 and has also adopted PostgreSQL, MySQL and OpenOffice.org. Previously, in 2003, the Forum for the Development of Free Software was initiated by the Ministry of Science and Information to support wider use of open source software in Poland.

Key policies:
The Polish government has also had a couple of attempts at delivering a set of guidelines for the adoption of open source software, before recommending the use of open standards in 2007. Meanwhile adoption projects have continued in Warsaw and Krakow.

And another thing:
Hope lies with the Poles: Poland’s profile in the international software industry rose considerably in 2004 when the Polish government managed to prevent the adoption of a European software patents directive by the Agriculture and Fisheries Commission. If you don’t remember this unfortunate episode, the fact that a software patent directive was about to be adopted by the Agriculture and Fisheries Commission tells you everything you need to know about what a political mess it was.

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