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.

Greece was the surprise winner of the last European Championships but its participation in this year’s event effectively ended with defeat to Russia on Saturday.

Key policies:
It is also unlikely to walk off with any prizes when it comes to the adoption of open source software, especially since the Greek government signed a public private partnership agreement (albeit a non-exclusive one) with Microsoft in 2006 to help implement its Digital Strategy 2006-2013 plan.

As might be expected, the agreement has been criticized for limiting local skills, while piracy has also been blamed for limiting further open source adoption, as well as the relative immaturity of the IT industry as a whole.

Linux and open source supporters across the country are attempting to take matters into their own hands. There have been protests about the fact that the archive of national broadcaster ERT is only available to Windows and Apple Mac users, for example.

Meanwhile the Greek Research and Technology Network, which supports Greek universities, schools and technological institutes, has launched a FOSS working group to study the potential use of FOSS across Greece.

Key projects:
There are isolated examples of public open source adoption projects, such as Heraklion on the island of Crete expressing a preference for open source software for its e-Government portal, Athens using Linux, Apache and PHP, and Toperos Xanthis using Linux and Joomla.

And another thing:
Dimitris Andreadis is currently the project lead for the JBoss Application Server at Red Hat. You can read his thoughts on the (lack of) open source adoption in Greece here. Or try the translated version – it’s all Greek to me (sorry).

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