Sharing software could cut soaring e-government costs, says report
European administrations should share public sector software in a bid to cut rising e-government information technology costs - set to rise by 28 per cent to 6.6 billion euro this year - says an independent study published by the European Commission. The 'Pooling open source software' study, financed by the Commission's Interchange of Data between Administrations (IDA) programme, recommends the creation of a clearing house to which administrations could donate software for reuse. It says the facility, which would concentrate on applications specific to public sector needs, could help encourage good practice in e-government services. Enterprise and Information Society Commissioner Erkki Liikanen said: 'Good practice is built on proven solutions that work. Software and concrete applications that work in practice are an important element of these. They could be usefully used as a source of inspiration for Member States to develop good and interactive public services in the future to the benefit of Europe's citizens.' Although the software would often need to be customised to local linguistic and legal requirements, the Commission says sharing the tools of e-government could lead to across-the-board improvements in the efficiency of the public sector in the EU. The study recommends that software developed for and owned by public administrations should be issued under an open source licence, and that quality guarantees should be provided by the software pooling facility. In this way, it says, the pooling facility would provide expertise and act as a focal point for a community of developers, users and policy-makers.