Public administrations in Austria need to increase their use of free and open source software, the government of Austria says in its Digital Strategy. The strategy proposes to ‘push’ (forcierung) open source by public administrations. This is intended to accelerate its uptake, explains Federal Chancellery for Digitalisation.
The Digital Strategy was presented on 19 January by Muna Duzdar, the State Secretary for Digitalisation and Harald Mahrer, State Secretary for Science, Research and Economy.
The roadmap describes open source as a way for digital society to increase growth, prosperity and citizen participation. In addition, in the section on Economy, the government says it will focus on open source and small and medium-sized companies in the AT:net programme, to promote and launch digital applications and products.
The digital roadmap points to its 2006 ‘position paper on open source’, to present how to use open source to everyone’s advantage.
Milestones
Austria’s public administrations commonly use open source for databases, content management systems, and other core services, a spokesperson for the Chancellery for Digitalisation says. “Some departments also use open source solutions on workstations, such as the Federal Ministry of Justice.” In addition, all of the country’s eGovernment modules (MOAs) are developed as open source, in order to promote their reuse. MOA modules are available for eID, eDelivery and eSignature.
Austria’s trade group for open source IT service suppliers, OSSBIG, welcomed the Digital Roadmap as good first step. The trade group was involved in drafting the strategy to emphasise the importance of open source. However, a few key elements are missing, a spokesperson for OSSBIG commented. “We would like to see a detailed action plan including measures, milestones and deliverables. The next version of the Digital Roadmap Austria should focus more on IT and less on telecommunication.”
More information:
Digital Roadmap Austria (in German)
Digital Roadmap Austria (PDF, in German)
Der Verein OSSBIG Austria - Open Source Software Business Information Group
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