Public administrations that use free and open source software solutions should engage with the free software communities. "Giving back is key", says Laurent Godard Councillor for ICT at Voreppe, a municipality of 9700 inhabitants in France's Rhône-Alpes region. The town is using free software solutions and, in return, has made several contributions toward their development.
Voreppe has funded several enhancements to WKPG. This tool, published under the GPL free software licence, enables the automation of software deployment, upgrades and the removal of applications on a ubiquitous proprietary PC operating system. Ever since the municipality started using OpenOffice and LibreOffice, in 2009, it has supported the free software community.
The town is also provisioning a server that is used for testing the office suite, managed by the LibreOffice community. And for every PC that is switched to LibreOffice, Voreppe donates a euro per year to the LaMouette association, helping it promote the use of free software in other municipalities and regions.
Contribute
Godard would like to see structural support from public administrations to free software projects. "Regions, states and the European institutions should work together, extending what Adullact or Mimo do in France." (Adullact is the platform for French civil servants working on free and open source software, Mimo is a working group on free software in France's ministries.)
"Giving back to the community includes more than simply donating money", says the councillor. "Far more valuable is contributing long-term, in person." That is why Voreppe's officials often volunteer to talk about the town's use of free and open source and funded development of features. "Public administrations should allocate some of their developers to contribute to foundations such as the Document Foundation or Mozilla."
Independence
Introducing free software in public administration is a political issue, says ICT councillor Godard. "The introduction has to be supported by both the political and technical decision makers." In Voreppe, the town council and the head of the IT department agreed on the overall objective, to increase the use of free software. This gave IT department room to gain knowledge of, for example, Linux systems, independent from IT vendors. "This is useful when dealing with vendors, and allows them to fix things themselves."
"Switching to free software is part of the political programme of Voreppe Avenir (Voreppe Future), of which councillor Godard is a member. Free software increases the efficiency of and IT department, helps to cut costs, shares knowledge and lowers the digital divide, the party reasons. To make sure the party really understand the issues, the councillor helped several of his party's colleagues to get started with free software. "They use the same solutions as the town's civil servants."
Interoperability
Voreppe's use of the Open Document Format (ODF) creates few interoperability problems. Mostly it is with companies sending documents in a proprietary electronic document format. "We had to purchase a few licences for a proprietary office suite to interact with these, but in the future we will be more firm on ODF." A bigger issue is applications that are tied to this proprietary office suite. The town however, is determined to increase its use of free software. "If we find suitable alternatives, we will replace these solutions for alternatives that support ODF."
More information:
Voreppe Avenir statement on free software (in French)
WPKG
Lamouette, announcement of LibreOffice test server (in French)
Lamouette, statement on Voreppe (in French)
Announcement of Voreppe's migration to LibreOffice (in French)