Navigating open source adoption in the public sector

Our focus in this paper is to better understand how and why various governments in Europe are adopting, using and cocreating open source software. Our study involved in-depth interviews of key stakeholders from a number of European government agencies. The main findings lead us to understand and organize our analysis under four broad categories of criteria that motivated open source adoption. They include economic concerns, technical and development features, risk management, and innovation and strategic issues. The more interesting finding was how the idea of lower costs and total cost of ownership was used by the interviewees as a linking platform for their narrative and motivations. This helped us to redefine TCO so that it made sense in relation to open source software in the public sector. We conclude the paper with a number of insights and practical lessons that will help other public sector organizations make better decisions.