Those interested in determining the technical and economical criteria that will allow Italy's public administrations to buy proprietary software solutions instead of going for free and open source, have only today left to register at the Agency for Digital Italy. The rules are needed after changes made by Italy's government this summer to its Digital Administration Code.
That Code instructs Italy's public administrations to prefer to use free and open source, or re-use existing software developed in-house. "Only when a technical and economical analysis demonstrates that it is not possible to obtain at a lower price an open source solution or to re-use a solution developed internally, then it is allowed to purchase a proprietary software licence."
The Agency for Digital Italy is now going to determine these criteria. Setting up the meetings will be completed this month. The process is expected to be completed by April 2013. "The results of the audit will be made available in order to collect comments and suggestions before final publication."
Stakeholders must point their role in the ICT market and in particular in the software market. They must also describe their professional expertise. The agency is in particular calling for representatives of communities of open source software.
The agency however requires interested parties to use 'registered email'. This is mostly available to lawyers, companies and accountants. The system is slowly adopted by companies, but in principle all Italians should be able to access to this mail set-up.
Open source software researcher Roberto Galoppini is about to finish his registration to participate. He refered to the agency's call for registration in a post on his blog this week Tuesday.
More information:
Call for registration by the Agency for Digital Italy
Roberto Galoppini's blog