Many public administrations don't want to share with their colleagues the software solutions that they paid for, said Mathieu Paapst, a legal researcher at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, in an interview last Thursday. To overcome this barrier to sharing and re-use, the Dutch government should force public organisations to pool IT budgets.

Paapst recommends to make the use of open source and open standards part of the national law. And, he says, the government should make clear to the country's public administrations that the current rules on open standards are already legally binding.

The researcher last week Thursday completed his PhD on the barriers which impact the Dutch procurement policy on open source and open standards. He concludes the government failed to make the country's public administrations understand and implement the policy.

In the past five years two government organisations were involved in communicating the policy; the NOiV, disbanded in early 2011, and the 'Standardisation Board and Forum'. Paapst says that the responsible ministries and all of the related public administration umbrella organisations themselves never actively encouraged the use of open source. Moreover, Paapst writes, a bad example was set by the influential Association of Dutch Municipalities. It stated in a 2009 public tender that it considered open source unnecessary and undesirable. The researcher adds: "none of the ministries involved in education, health care or social security ever made agreements or arrangements regarding the policy."

Still locked-in
Paapst concludes that the aims of the policy have not been met. The country's public administrations continue to suffer from IT vendor lock-in and there still is no level playing field for open source software.

A future IT policy should correct this, recommends Paapst. To succeed, a new policy must also appeal to ICT companies. "Some will want to protect their monopoly position, but the majority will be better off with free competition and a well-functioning market."

Paapst teaches 'Law and IT' at the university in Groningen. His PhD research is based on a detailed investigation of eighty calls for tender, published in 2010, followed by interviews with twenty public sector buyers with expertise in IT procurement.

The researcher hopes that a future IT policy will take into account all of the barriers that he found. "My thesis contains a model that can help to evaluate the impact of similar policies elsewhere, like in the United Kingdom or at a EU level."

More information:
Dissertation by Mathieu Paapst (in Dutch, with English summary, pdf)