Open Source Software (OSS) is today recognised as a vital building block in our common digital infrastructure. A huge percentage of today’s software comprises OSS, and the dependency on it in companies’ codebases has grown considerably in recent years. Within public sector enterprises, however, the adoption of OSS has thus far been rather limited in comparison, yet is on the rise. A lot of factors are fueling public sector demand for OSS. Recent studies suggest that OSS adoption can provide a plethora of positive outcomes like economic growth, innovation, and competition.
OSS has also been shown to deliver benefits that are particularly important in the public sector environment, among them better interoperability, transparency, and digital sovereignty. In Europe, the importance of OSS for public sector transformation has recently been recognised both in joint Ministerial declarations and through the establishment of Open Source Program Offices, a function for promoting and enabling the use and sharing of OSS, on both the European and national levels. In Asia, notably in South Korea and China, OSS has already for some years featured significantly in industrial policy to boost the competitiveness of the IT sector in those nations. In North America, the US government has long since developed federal policies concerning the usage and donation to OSS. Today most notably in the wake of rising security and supply chain concerns for all forms of software, the current administration and federal agencies are discussing the role of OSS in security and seeking increased public-private partnership including discussions of reducing friction to enable broader participation in open source development and adoption.
At the worldwide level, interest in OSS can be noticed among institutions such as the World Bank, World Health Organization, and the UN. Initiatives such as the Phoenix and GovStack are also starting to emerge to provide an OSS infrastructure for the public sector, both in industrialised and developing countries. Our goals for this special issue are to examine the factors that affect the success of OSS adoption, development, and collaboration within public sector organisations; identify the necessary ingredients for success; and think about how software engineering practises may need to be adapted to the public sector. Since information, methods, and experience for how to develop and maintain OSS may to varying extents be transferable, and in some circumstances need to be modified, the viewpoints of public sector organisations, industry, and the general OSS community are of interest to us. Software engineering in the business context has received more attention, but in the public sector there are a number of additional considerations to take into account.
These include a wider variety of motivations and objectives, a lack of available technical resources, legally mandated constraints in the form of convoluted procurement frameworks and practises, and short-term or insufficient policy incentives. In order to better understand how public sector organisations might adopt, develop, and collaborate on OSS, we welcome both in-depth case studies and experience reports as well as analytical contributions that try to throw light on this complicated topic. Interest lies in a wide variety of domains, some of which are: Combining public and private resources. Where and how OSS is used to facilitate public-private partnerships that yield new capabilities for government agencies while also justifying the private sector’s involvement in the process. Acquisition.
How government agencies determine which services or distributions to invest in for the creation or upkeep of OSS, and how they weigh the costs and benefits of OSS vs those of proprietary alternatives. Sustainability. How government agencies determine which open-source software (OSS) projects can be built upon reliably to improve their long-term viability and which vital parts of such projects need continued maintenance. Also, how government agencies help ensure the ongoing success of relevant OSS initiatives. Economics.
Impacts on economies, competition in tenders, expansion of SMEs, in-house skills, capacities, ways of working, involvement with civil society and citizen participation, quality of public services, and society at large as a result of public sector adoption, development, and collaboration on OSS (may include meeting the UN Sustainable Development Goals). Refraining from becoming trapped. How government agencies use, create, and work on OSS to protect the accessibility, integrity, security, control, and ownership of data collected for the common good, as well as to prevent lock-in of any kind. In order to triumph over obstacles specific to the public sector, we must. Explain how adoption, development, or contribution to a certain OSS project was possible in spite of or by altering obstacles such as government processes or predefined ways for adoption or investment.