The Migration of Public Administrations Towards Open Source Desktop Software: Recommendations from Research and Validation through a Case Study

Abstract

Several public administrations (PA) have expressed an increasing interest in open source software in the past few years and are currently migrating to open source software on the desktop. Given the large impact such a migration has on the organization, there is a need for learning from the experiences of previous migrations. In this chapter, we deduct a number of recommendations and lessons learned from previous research conducted on the migration of PAs to open source desktop software. Next, we describe a case study on the migration of the Brussels-Capital Region towards OpenOffice.org, and compare their experiences to these recommendations. In general, our results are quite consistent with previous findings, but also indicate that additional research is still required in order to create a set of best practices—based on empirical research—for the migration towards open source software on the desktop.