Fria och öppna programvaror inom kommunal verksamhet : Vägen mot öppna standarder?

Sammanfattning: This report deals with the attitudes within municipalities of open source software and open standards and if open source software may be an option to gain open standards. The aim has been to find out if open source software and open standards would be able to solve the lock-in problems that municipalities have against proprietary software. The study is conducted as an exploratory, inductive and qualitative study with depth interviews of subjectively selected informants as data collection method. A literature review has also been implemented by the relevant books and articles. Some economic determinants of municipalities to make use of open source software have not been considered in this study. The informants used in this study are all IT managers in a Swedish municipality and our key informants have been selected in a subjective manner based on the expertise they have in the subject. The conclusions drawn were that municipalities have been difficult to define standards and open standards, and that they do not automatically see the connection between open standards and open software. They also see different areas of interest for standardization.