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.

Having recovered from an early defeat to The Netherlands, the Italian team battled their way out of the “group of death” but never really looked like the team that won the World Cup two years ago. It was not altogether surprising that Spain overcame their penalty jinx to send the Italians packing.

Key policies:
In October 2002, a commission for free software in public administration was established to study open source adoption. in May 2003 CNIPA (Centro Nazionale per l’Informatica della Pubblica Amministrazione) published a study (PDF in Italian) that recommended (amongst other things) that public offices should neither prohibit nor penalize the use of OSS packages. A working group later produced guidelines (PDF in Italian) as to how to remain compliant with the recommendations.

The Italian government put its money where its mouth was in December 2006 as Italian budget law committed €30m over three years to projects that stimulate the information society (although what happened to those funds is open to question) while in May 2007 Italy launched its own repository of open source software for public administrations, the Collaborative Development Environment.

In June 2007 Italian Minister of Reform and Innovations in Public Administration, Luigi Nicolais, announced the creation of the second Open Source Commission to define guidelines for public procurement of open source software. In May 2008 it published its first draft report.

Key projects:
National open source success stories include the Ministry of Justice, which has adopted Red Hat Enterprise Linux, as has the Ministry of Economics and Finance.

Meanwhile the National Institute of Design and Mint is using JBoss, and Corte dei Conti is also using Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

In July 2007 the IT department of the Italian Parliament presented plans for the migration of 200 servers and more than 3,500 desktop PCs to Linux and OpenOffice. The migration was due to begin in September and take two years.

Regional government projects include Cremona, Foggia, Rome, Tuscany, Emilia Romagna, Genoa, Bologna, Balzano, Savona, Umbria, and Tuscany again.

More details are available of Rome’s open source policy, Genova’s OpenOffice trials, Bologna’s open source projects, and Bolzano’s FUSS project.

Key vendors:
Italy has a growing number of open source vendors, including business intelligence vendor SpagoBI, and services firm Sourcesense. Mobile software vendor Funambol is based in California is described by CEO Fabrizio Capobianco as having US capital and Italian heart and maintains its R&D centre in Pavia.

View from the ground:
“Open source became a hot topic in 2002, when the first open source commission was instituted, and the output was a booklet introducing Italian public administrations to open source. Since then we have been seeing many regions (Italy is a nation subdivided into 20 regions, but a recent constitution amendment (devolution) allow all of them to write their own laws on some matters, included ICT policies) writing their own laws on software acquisitions and open standards adoption, a second open source commission and, last but not least, the Italian Budget law assigned funds to sustain innovation through open source. At a political level open source got a lot of attention, but laws and recommendations have still little impact on open source adoption, since the procurement process is lacking clear policy and procedures to help those who write public tenders to consider free software. Open source is a process, not a product, let’s see if Minister Brunetta can eventually speed up such process, I cross my fingers!”
Roberto Galopinni, with thanks to Roberto for his contribution and overall coverage of open source adoption in Europe.

And another thing:
If all this talk of Italy has got you hankering for pizza cooked in a traditional brick oven, you’re in luck. The Pompeii Oven is a set of plans that describe how to build a traditional Italian brick pizza oven. Best of all the plans are free “much like open source software”. Bravissimo!

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