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.

Sweden crashed out of EURO 2008 last night a Russia qualified for the knockout stages with a well-deserved 2-0 win. As home to MySQL Sweden might be expected to be one of the more progressive adopters of open source but while there is significant interest, details of deployment projects are relatively hard to find.

Key policies:
The Swedish Agency for Public Management’s 2003 feasibility study identified a number of existing projects (see below) and recommended that open source software should be judged on a par with proprietary software in a procurement process.

In 2005 an association of county councils, municipalities, and private healthcare providers known as Carelink published a report (PDF) on Sweden’s legal framework for open source software which stated that “wider distribution of open source software that has been developed internally by health and social services has the potential to enhance the effectiveness of IT in health services and would achieve faster diffusion of common solutions in health care.”

Also in 2005 the Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions created Programverket, a project to help the public sector adopt or convert to open source software. Programverket is based on the principle that “software development financed by tax money should in principle provide open source software, unless there are specific reasons to the contrary.” Further details on the projects can be found here.

Key projects:
Examples included in the Swedish Agency for Public Management’s 2003 feasibility study included the Meteorological and Hydrological Institute, the Premium Pension Authority, the National Labour Market Administration, and Malmo General Hospital.

Since then a number of further projects have been added to the list. Not surprisingly MySQL has had some success in its own back yard, including a project with the Swedish National Police, which saved the equivalent of 400 fully-equipped police cars on moving to an infrastructure based on Linux, JBoss, and MySQL.

Other state projects include Apoteket Sweden’s largest state-owned pharmacy chain, which migrated to Red Hat Enterprise Linux at 900 pharmacies as part of a move to Intel hardware, the Swedish Armed Forces’ deal with Red Hat to enable migrations from Windows NT to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and the Swedish Railroad, which has adopted JBoss.

Key vendors:
MySQL is the leading Swedish open source vendor, or at least it was until the Sun acquisition, but Sun’s new database business unit is keen to stay true to its roots. The country also boasts a host of open source services firms and consultancies, as can be seen from the member list of Open Source Sweden.

And another thing:

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