The use of free and open source software by sixteen schools in the Swedish municipality of Sollefteå is proving its usefulness to the municipal administration and encouraging its moove to open source applications.

Lower costs of procurement and freedom from IT vendor lock-in are the two main benefits from using free and open source software, concludes a survey conducted among public administrations in Europe, published on 28 March 2012.

Public administrations in Iceland are increasing their use of free and open source software. The country's Government recently launched a one year migration project for all of its public institutions.

A first draft of a metadata standard to help describe and classify free and open-source software in a machine-readable way is to be published at the end of February 2012. The specification of the standard in question is being developed by a group of government specialists and software developers involved in electronic government services around the EU.

Cutting IT budgets of public administrations will push them to use more open source software, expects Daniel Melin, a procurement specialist at 'Statens Inköpscentral', the Swedish Central Procurement Agency, in his intervention during the Free Society and Nordic Summit Conference 2011 (FSCONS 2011) in November 2011.

On 1 December 2011, the Procurement Office of the German Federal Ministry of Interior introduced new software to support public procurement procedures. The software will be tested for six months and it will be used only in the framework of the procedures of Unit B4 - Weapons, Boats, Tools and Machines industry.

In an opening speech to the fourth edition of Open World Forum (22-24 September 2011, Paris), the French Minister for Industry, Energy and the Digital Economy Eric Besson acknowledged the "decisive contribution" of open source software (OSS) to the Digital Revolution.