The Adoption of Open Source Desktop Software in a Large Public Administration

Several public administrations are currently migrating towards open source software (OSS) on the desktop. In this paper, we describe a case study of a large Belgian public administration that is currently migrating its desktops towards Linux and OpenOffice.org. The goal of the paper is to discuss whether such a migration is feasible, and why and how the migration could be undertaken. We describe the implementation trajectory followed and compare our findings to previous studies in this field. We offer several guidelines that can contribute to the formation of “best practices” for the transition towards OSS on the desktop. Our results indicate that a migration towards OSS on the desktop is feasible, but requires a change in the attitude of end users.