[SoftwarePublico] Italy puts Free Software first in public sector

Antonio Terceiro terceiro em softwarelivre.org
Sábado Outubro 25 09:32:11 BRST 2014 

Provavelmente tem coisas ai que são úteis como inspiração para políticas públicas para software livre a nível nacional.


........ Mensagem Original ........
De: Stefano Zacchiroli
Enviado: 24 de outubro de 2014 10h20min59s BRT
Para: Planet Debian
Assunto: Stefano Zacchiroli: Italy puts Free Software first in public sector

<http://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2014/10/Italy_puts_Free_Software_first_in_public_sector/>

Debian participation in Italy's CAD68 committee

(The initial policy change discussed in this document is a couple of 
years old now, but it took about the same time to be fully implemented, 
and AFAIK the role Debian played in it has not been documented yet.)

In October 2012 the Italian government, led at the time by Mario 
Monti[1], did something rather innovative, at least for a country that 
is not usually ahead of its time in the area of information technology 
legislation. They decided to change the main law[2] (the "CAD", for 
*Codice dell'Amministrazione Digitale*) that regulates the acquisition 
of software at all levels of the public administration (PA), giving an 
*explicit preference to the acquisition of Free Software*.

The new formulation of article 68[3] of the CAD first lists some macro 
criteria (e.g., TCO[4], adherence to open standards, security support, 
etc.) that public administrations in Italy shall use as ranking criteria 
in software-related calls for tenders. Then, and this is the most 
important part, the article affirms that the acquisition of 
*proprietary* software solutions is permitted *only* if it is 
*impossible* to choose Free Software solutions instead; or, 
alternatively, to choose software solutions that have already being 
acquired (and paid for) by the PA in the past, reusing preexisting 
software. The combined effect of these two provisions is that all *new* 
software acquisitions by PAs in Italy will be Free Software, unless it 
is motivated—in writing, challengable by a judge—that it was 
impossible to do otherwise. Isn't it great?

It is, except that such a law is not necessarily easy to adhere to in 
practice, especially for small public administrations (e.g., 
municipalities of a few hundred people, not uncommon in Italy) which 
might have very little clue about software in general, and even less so 
about Free Software. This is why the government also tasked the relevant 
Italian agency[5] to provide guidelines on how to choose software in a 
way that conforms with the new formulation of article 68. The agency 
decided to form a committee to work on the guidelines (because you 
*always* need a committee, right? [A] ).

To my surprise, the call for participation to be part of the committee 
explicitly listed representatives of Free Software communities as 
privileged software stakeholders that they wanted to have on the 
committee—kudos to the agency for that. (The Italian wording on the 
call was: Costituirà titolo di preferenza rivestire un ruolo di […] 
referenti di community del software a codice sorgente aperto.) 
Therefore, after various prods by fellow European Free Software 
activists that were aware of the ongoing change in legislation, I 
applied to be a volunteer CAD68 committee member, got selected, and 
ended up working over a period of about 6 months (March-September 2013) 
to help the agency writing the new software acquisition guidelines.

Logistically, it hasn't been entirely trivial, as the default meeting 
place was in Rome, I live in Paris, and the agency didn't really have a 
travel budget for committee members. That's why I've sought sponsorship 
from Debian, offering to represent Debian views within the committee; 
Lucas kindly agreed[6] to my request. So what did I do on behalf of 
Debian as a committee member during those months?

Most of my job has been some sort of consulting on how community-driven 
Free Software projects—like Debian—work, on how the software they 
produce can be relied upon and contributed to, and more generally on how 
the PA can productively interact with such projects. In particular, I've 
been happy to work on the related work section of the guidelines, 
ensuring they point to relevant documents such as the French government 
guidelines on how to adopt Free Software (AKA * circulaire Ayrault*[7]). 
I've also drafted the guidelines section on Free Software directories, 
ensuring that important resources such as *FSF's Free Software 
Directory*[8] are listed as starting points for PAs that looking for 
software solutions for specific needs.

Another part of my job has been ensuring that the guidelines do not end 
up betraying the principle of Free Software preference that is embodied 
in article 68. A majority of committee members came from a Free Software 
background, so that might not seem a difficult goal to accomplish. But 
it is important to notice that: (a) the final editor of the guidelines 
is the agency itself, not the committee, so having a "pro-Free Software" 
majority within the committee doesn't mean much per se; and (b) lobbying 
from the "pro-proprietary software" camp did happen, as it is entirely 
natural in these cases. In this respect I'm happy with the result: I do 
believe that the software selection process recommended by the 
guidelines, finally published[9] in January 2014, *upholds the Free 
Software preference principle* of article 68. I credit both the agency 
and the non-ambiguity of the law (on this specific point) for that 
result.

All in all, this has been a positive experience for me. It has 
reaffirmed my belief that Debian is a respected, non-partisan political 
actor of the wider software/ICT ecosystem. This experience has also 
given me a chance to be part of country-level policy-making, which has 
been very instructive on how and why good ideas might take a while to 
come into effect and influence citizen lives. Speaking of which, I'm now 
looking forward to the first alleged *violations* of article 68 in 
Italy, and how they will be dealt with.

Abundant popcorn will certainly be needed.

Links & press

If you want to know more about this topic, I've collected below links to 
resources that have documented, in various languages, the publication of 
the CAD68 guidelines.

- official material:

- announcement[10] (it) by the agency
- guidelines[11] (.pdf, it)

- press releases:

- FSFE press release[12] (en), also covered by LWN[13] (en)
- April press release[14] (fr), also in english[15]

- press/blog coverage:

- on Joinup[16] (en), European Commission blog dedicated to Free 
Software adoption in Europe, with comments by yours truly and Carlo 
Piana
- on OpenSource.com[17] (en), popular blog for FOSS-related topics
- by Carlo Piana[18] (it), fellow member of the CAD68 committee, 
representing KDE and FSFE
- on Punto Informatico[19] (it), popular Italian tech blog
- on Apogeo online[20] (it), blog of a popular Italian publisher of IT 
books
- on Agenda Digitale EU[21] (it), blog dedicated to digital innovation 
in the Italian PA
- by Simone Aliprandi[22] (en), lawyer who followed closely the work of 
CAD68 committee

- interviews:

- on My Solution[23] (it), by yours truly
- radio interview[24] (it) by yours truly for Caterpillar[25], RAI Radio 
2

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mario_Monti
[2] 
http://archivio.digitpa.gov.it/amministrazione-digitale/CAD-testo-vigente
[3] 
http://archivio.digitpa.gov.it/amministrazione-digitale/CAD-testo-vigente#art68
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_cost_of_ownership
[5] http://www.agid.gov.it/
[6] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2013/05/msg00002.html
[7] http://circulaire.legifrance.gouv.fr/pdf/2012/09/cir_35837.pdf
[8] https://directory.fsf.org/
[9] 
http://www.agid.gov.it/notizie/riuso-valutazione-comparativa-online-la-circolare
[10] 
http://www.agid.gov.it/notizie/riuso-valutazione-comparativa-online-la-circolare
[11] 
http://www.agid.gov.it/sites/default/files/linee_guida/circolare_agid_63-2013_linee_guida_art_68_del_cad_ver_13_b.pdf
[12] https://fsfe.org/news/2014/news-20140116-01.en.html
[13] https://lwn.net/Articles/580591/
[14] 
http://www.april.org/litalie-met-en-place-la-priorite-pour-le-logiciel-libre-dans-ladministration
[15] 
http://www.april.org/en/italy-implements-prioritization-free-software-public-administration
[16] 
https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/community/osor/news/italy-posts-benchmark-open-vs-closed-software
[17] 
http://opensource.com/government/13/11/free-open-source-italian-public-administration
[18] http://piana.eu/it/68cad
[19] 
http://punto-informatico.it/3973355/PI/News/pa-perche-scegliere-software-foss.aspx
[20] 
http://www.apogeonline.com/webzine/2014/01/15/se-non-basta-la-legge-ecco-pronte-le-linee-guida
[21] 
http://www.agendadigitale.eu/egov/623_le-norme-per-il-software-libero-nella-pa-pro-e-contro.htm
[22] http://openisfree.blogspot.fr/2014/01/italian-foss-guidelines.html
[23] 
http://www.mysolutionpost.it/blogs/it-law/piana/2014/01/acquisti-software-pa.aspx
[24] 
http://caterpillar.blog.rai.it/2014/01/20/caterpillar-del-20-gennaio/
[25] http://caterpillar.blog.rai.it/

[A] http://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/planet-debian/../../smileys/smile.png
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Feed: Planet Debian
<http://planet.debian.org/>
Item: Stefano Zacchiroli: Italy puts Free Software first in public sector
<http://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2014/10/Italy_puts_Free_Software_first_in_public_sector/>
Date: Fri Oct 24 12:20:59 UTC 2014
Author: Stefano Zacchiroli

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