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Software development for governmental use utilizing free and open source software

Authors:

Tryggvi Björgvinsson,

Helgi ThorbergssonAuthors Info & Claims

ICEGOV '07: Proceedings of the 1st international conference on Theory and practice of electronic governance

Pages 133 - 140

https://doi.org/10.1145/1328057.1328087

Published: 10 December 2007 Publication History

Abstract

The Icelandic government is about to release its policy on free and open source software. Many governments around the world have either already released a similar policy or have one planned. The policy of the Icelandic government deals with both the use and the development of free and open source software.

This paper takes a close look at the free and open source software policies, particularly the Icelandic one, from a software development perspective. The goal is to show how governments can utilize free and open source software when customized software is required. The paper also touches upon licensing issues for free and open source software by discussing the European Union Public License.

Governmental project management and services of small software companies and the free and open source community are the focal points of the research. The basis of the research is the i2010 policy framework of the European Commission. The paper concludes by proposing a suitable methodology to use for governmental software development and recommending tools that foster both development and management, with emphasis on the latter.

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T. Björgvinsson and H. Thorbergsson. Differences in Information Flow of Icelandic and Free and Open Source Software Development. In Proceedings of the 2007 International Conference on Software Engineering Research and Practice, pages 66--72, 2007.

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Index Terms

Software development for governmental use utilizing free and open source software
1. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics
    1. Management of computing and information systems
      1. Project and people management
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software development process management
  2. Software notations and tools
    1. Software configuration management and version control systems

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Reviews

Reviewer: Larry Bernstein

If you are looking for simple and straightforward definitions of "free" and "open-source" software, this is the paper for you. Go directly to section 3, and treasure it. Section 4 is useful if you are developing software systems in the European Union (EU). The authors describe how free and open-source software can be used to build custom software products for governmental use. The reference list provides good insights for people who want to do software business in the EU. Just knowing where to find information about the EU public license may be worth the bother of reading this paper. Don't be put off by the title; the paper is well written, crisp, and informative. Did you know that there are 600 companies in the Icelandic software industry__?__ Online Computing Reviews Service

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Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences

ICEGOV '07: Proceedings of the 1st international conference on Theory and practice of electronic governance

December 2007

471 pages

ISBN:9781595938220

DOI:10.1145/1328057

Editors:
Tomasz Janowski
United Nations University
,
Theresa A. Pardo
Center for Technology in Government

Copyright © 2007 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 10 December 2007

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ICEGOV '07

ICEGOV '07: International conference on theory and practice in electronic governance

December 10 - 13, 2007

Macao, China

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ICEGOV '07 Paper Acceptance Rate 33 of 130 submissions, 25%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 350 of 865 submissions, 40%

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