For the last few months, the Open Source Society has been facilitating a project called the Public Sector Remix. This involves a number of public sector agencies investigating use of a free software stack on the desktop and understanding the barriers preventing its more widespread adoption.

Public sector and Open Source Software (PS-OSS), a report commissioned by the EU Commission addresses the question : What would be the potential impact on the development of the Information Society if public organisations (administrations, research institutions, universities, agencies, public companies) were to release software fully owned by them under a Open Source licence?

Free/Open Source software is great for Public Administrations, but Free/Open data are even more important. Making public sector information really accessible, that is publishing online raw data in open formats and under open licenses, can both improve transparency in government and foster local economical and cultural activities.

The take up of free, open source software in the public sector is painfully slow despite the Government's Open Source Action Plan...are we to blame?

THE Finnish public sector is now requiring (in so much as it can require anything) that all public sector agencies, including schools, drop any and all closed source, closed protocols, and closed formats* and move entirely to open ones.

The UK's budget is looming and the public sector is charged with increasing spending on front line services by 4% while budgets go up 2%. Free and open source software is a way of saving millions of pounds in licensing fees and delivering often better products, this article argues.

Public sector and government organizations around the world are adopting increasingly mature open-source products, with Australia at the front of the trend.

The European Interoperability Framework (EIF) is an important document for the European public sector. Version 1 had strong support for open standards and royalty-free licences to patents. A leaked version 2 shows that open standards and open source are out, and "openness" of the vaguest kind is in, as are software patents.

To be honest, for a couple of years now I have been pretty skeptical about the future of Free and Open Source software in Finnish schools and education sector in general. In Finland we have a lot of open source expertise and know-how. We have developers. I also assume that majority of the (liberally) higher educated people in Finland, at least know what is "Open Source" and "Linux".