Constitutional affairs legal affairs

Workshop: Legal aspects of free and open source software 
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administration can freely select a Free Software which is inherently « freely accessible, free 
of charge and modifiable by any service provider » and procure customisation, installation 
and maintenance services in relation to that particular software. 
3.6.2 Results 
Benjamin Jean (free software specialist and advocate)
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 welcomes and appreciates the 
relevance and clear-sightedness of the circular, but regrets the absence of the local 
administrations, which could have also been involved in the sharing and mutualising 
process. 
The circular has been welcomed by the APRIL (French association for the promotion and 
defence of free software) as good news, but the association underlines that this decision 
from the French State is just a first step which needs to be further implemented. The 
association notices that the document provides only high level guidelines that must be 
further detailed and implemented by taking many concrete measures
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. 
3.6.3 Features 

 
ACTION:  
 
Policy (ministerial circular) 

 
DECISION LEVEL:   National 

 
ACTION LEVEL:  
National 

 
OBJECTIVES:   
Levelling the playing field 
Fostering the use and mutualisation of free software 

 
MEASURES TAKEN:  Selection of a set of credible free software alternatives 
Creation of expert networks 
Free software monitoring 
Contributing to Free Software development 
Developing a culture of FOSS use 

 
LICENSING:   
Reference to “free software” 
 

 
EFFECTIVENESS: 
It is too early to assess the concrete results of the initiative, 
which consist of high level guidelines. 
The initiative requires an important implementation work that 
remains to be determined and carried out. 
 
4. OBSERVATIONS 
 
What first strikes the observer when comparing the different cases described in this briefing 
paper is the diversity of the initiatives. Whereas the logic lying behind them is usually 
evolving around the same concerns and objectives, the adopted strategies and concrete 
actions are very diverse in terms of scope, scale, means and ambitions. Furthermore, they 
are not at the same stage of development and implementation. This, in addition to the 
cultural and state structure differences, renders any meaningful comparison difficult. 
All the initiatives aim at improving the public procurement practices and stem from the 
observation that even though FOSS presents inherent characteristics that correspond to 
good ICT governance principles, the option is not considered enough when choices are 
                                                 
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 B.
 
J
EAN
, « Synthèse sur la publication par le Premier Ministre Jean-Marc Ayrault de la circulaire du 19 
septembre 2012 présentant des orientations et des recommandations sur le bon usage des logiciels libres dans 
l'administration française 
», 27 septembre 2012,  
available at 
http://blog.vvlibri.org/index.php?post/2012/09/27/Synth%C3%A8se-sur-la-publication-par-le-Premier-Ministre-
Jean-Marc-Ayrault-de-la-circulaire-du-19-septembre-2012-pr%C3%A9sentant-des-orientations-et-des-
recommandations-sur-le-bon-usage-des-logiciels-libres-dans-l-administration-fran%C3%A7aise
. 
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 « Analyse détaillée de la circulaire Ayrault sur le bon usage des logiciels libres dans les administrations », 
APRIL, 8 novembre 2012, available at  
http://www.april.org/analyse-detaillee-circulaire-ayrault-sur-le-bon-usage-
des-logiciels-libres-dans-les-administrations
. 

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Policy Department C: Citizens' Rights and Constitutional Affairs 
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made. Raising awareness seems to be the first (explicit or implicit) objective, and effect, in 
all cases.  
The guidelines attached to the French Ayrault Circular are particularly interesting on that 
aspect as they stress that one of the main causes of the lack of awareness of FOSS is the 
fact that, contrary to proprietary software, FOSS is usually not the subject of ongoing 
marketing and promotion practices. Therefore, FOSS and their communities should indeed 
be actively monitored by the administrations’ procurement officers, and preferably by 
dedicated open source experts. The importance of the active participation of the 
administration IT staff in the community is also illustrated by the Belgian IMIO project, 
which has been created on the top of a community of developers (CommunesPlone) 
composed to a large extent of IT workers employed by the municipalities involved or by the 
SME’s providing the services to the latter and to the public company. IMIO is therefore 
entirely integrated in the community and is one of its main actors.  
Part of IMIO’s success is also due to its bottom-up organisation, which embraces the 
“traditional” open source ways
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. It has been created by the municipalities for the 
municipalities, on the basis of a general observation: on the one hand, each one of them 
disposes of very limited budgets and resources to procure or develop specific management 
tools, CMS, websites, e-Gov platforms; on the other hand, they all share the same needs. 
The municipalities realised that pooling resources to develop a pool of common software 
was therefore the natural way to address the issue.  
This approach is very different from the NOIV program, the French Circular, the UK 
strategy or the legislative approaches, which are typical of top down governance. In such 
type of initiatives, any factor of resistance to change must be carefully analysed and 
integrated in the strategy. A good strategy should include an awareness phase and, 
according to Paapst, a subsequent persuasion phase with four dimensions: a legal 
dimension, a technical dimension, a financial dimension and a subjective 
“knowledge/experience” dimension. Within this subsequent phase different elements 
influence the degree of willingness to adopt and use a new strategic IT policy in any of the 
four identified dimensions. According to Paapst, a reason why the NOIV has not been as 
successful as expected is that “for instance the mere use of the legal instrument (e.g. the 
European procurement guidelines) is not enough to change behaviour and to 
counterbalance negative influences coming from within the technical dimension and the 
experience/knowledge dimension”
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. By welcoming the Italian initiative with caution, Piana 
& Aliprandi confirm Paapst’s theory: purely financial reasons are equally not enough to 
ensure a successful migration to FOSS
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.  
Once a public administration is aware and convinced that FOSS is good for its ICT, it can 
draw many teachings from the experiences analysed in this briefing paper.  
Even before considering a call for tender, there is a consensus amongst the authorities 
involved that downloading FOSS free of any charge or compulsory fee can be a valid means 
of acquiring software without the requirement of a competitive bidding
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. Once the FOSS is 
selected and downloaded, paid services and support for such software can be acquired via 
the traditional public contract process. Such method has been validated by the French 
Council of State. 
In the framework of a call for tenders, the Italian Constitutional Court teaches that the 
concept of FOSS is independent of any given technology, brand or product but refers to a 
contractual regime that can be preferred without damaging competition. References to the 
concept of free and open source software are therefore always legal (contrary to the use of 
                                                 
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 E.
 
R
AYMOND
’s “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” describes the bottom-up software design approach of the Linux 
community. It is available at  
http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/homesteading/
. 
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 M. P
AAPST
, Barrières en doorwerking : Een onderzoek naar de invloed van het open source en open standaarden 
beleid op de Nederlandse aanbestedingspraktijk, PhD thesis defended on 10 January 2013, available at 
http://irs.ub.rug.nl/ppn/353037710
. 
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 Idem. 
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 This is also confirmed in the European Commission’s IDABC programme’s “Guideline on public procurement of 
Open Source Software” of March 2010, available at 
http://joinup.ec.europa.eu/sites/default/files/OSS-
procurement-guideline%20-final.pdf
. 

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