One of six themes that emerged from the EOLE 2026 online kick-off workshop (25 June). Background: see the kick-off topic.
Why it matters for sovereignty. A strong claim made at the workshop: the main obstacle to open source in the public sector is not legal or financial but cultural. Italy has had pro-FOSS preference laws for around 15 years, yet many administrations still choose proprietary solutions, “even going against the law”.
What came up at the workshop. Public servants want to feel risk-free; open source’s no-warranty, no-single-responsible-party nature clashes with a procurement culture that wants everything guaranteed, with penalties. Laws without penalties become “dead words”. Culture also means simply knowing open source exists: many use Mozilla without knowing it is open source. Public administration is not one thing: technical staff already use and contribute to FOSS quietly, procurement is starting to get it, but legal services often act as gatekeepers who say no to anything outside proprietary sales. OSPOs were repeatedly cited as the practical lever for culture change. Written contributions on the board added two angles: in industry too, open source is often seen “as a danger” by legal and non-technical teams but not by engineers (a mindset and information gap); and “reuse-first” is a cultural matter, requiring help to match existing FOSS tools to actual needs.
What already exists to build on. Italian FOSS preference and reuse-first provisions (Codice dell’Amministrazione Digitale, art. 68-69); OSPO practice, including public OSPOs; the FUSS project (FOSS in South Tyrol public education); university strategy work; WIPO and other open source training; a proposal for an up-to-date pan-European resource on software reuse and successful migrations away from proprietary suites.
Open questions. Which key roles (procurement officers, legal officers, OSPO leads) should be targeted, and with which arguments? Do preference laws need enforcement and penalties to work? How to organise “reuse-first” in practice?
How to contribute. Reply below with experiences of adoption, migration or blockage, ideally by end of September 2026. Rapporteurs welcome for the Barcelona event (November 2026): volunteer by replying below or by direct message on this forum. Possible outputs: a “who to convince and how” playbook and a shared resource on migrations and reuse.