Parliaments around the world are only slowly increasing their use of free and open source solutions, according to the World e-Parliament Report 2012, published last week. Most parliaments (80 %) now use at least one open source application. In most cases this type of software is used to run servers (50 %), for webpublishing (36 %), databases (31 %) and email (31 %).
The report is prepared by the Global Centre for ICT in Parliament, a project by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. It presents the results of a survey among 156 parliaments from around the globe, including answers submitted by parliaments in all EU Member States.
Concerning open source, the report sees only little change to the numbers found in 2009, the year of the previous survey. That year the report expressed concern about the relatively low level of use of open source software. In 2009, half of parliaments used open source for running servers, 35 per cent used it for webpublishing, 29 per cent for databases and 32 per cent for email.
The results from the new survey show that the use of open source software did go up for some applications: "Document management systems went from 10 per cent in 2009 to 21 per cent in 2012 and content management systems went from 15 per cent to 28 per cent."
Reverse relation to income
It also notes that "open source software and open standards for documents have an inverse relationship to the income levels of the parliaments". When asking about the most useful technologies introduced in the past two years to improve the work of parliament, one of five parliaments in low income countries mention open source. In high income countries, open source is mentioned by just 7 percent.
According to one of the authors of the report, Jeffrey Griffith, senior advisor for the Global Centre for ICT in Parliament, this does not mean that countries at higher income levels would not also find open source helpful. "One explanation might be that, given the cost of commercial software licenses, open source software would be considered particularly helpful to parliaments in countries with less income."
More information:
World e-Parliament Report 2012 (zipped pdf file)