> Guardando da ottimista: ieri l'Europa ha pubblicato il rapporto “The impact > of Open Source Software and Hardware on technological independence, > competitiveness and innovation in the EU economy”
Grazie Flavia, riporto parte dello studio [1] (il termine "fantastic" riferito al diritto in Italia credo di non averlo mai sentito prima) One interviewee working in the private legal domain of IT law described the laws in Italy as “fantastic”. Yet Italy has received criticism from different directions regarding its Open Source efforts (Nagle, 2019; Hillenius, 2013; Montegiove, 2016). What explains this gap between legal status and experienced reality? Literature and interviewees point toward the lack of implementation as the main issue of Italy’s disappointing Open Source policy outcomes. The successful implementation of new policy requires awareness, competence and active political support among those charged with implementing the new rules. In the case of Italy, data would indicate that at least the first two requirements were not sufficiently fulfilled. The changes to the new law were made in steps from 2012 onwards, and adjustments were frequent. Fundamentally, in the field of public procurement Open Source procurement is a niche, and constant changes to the legislative framework have the potential to confuse procurement officers who are not specialised to the same degree and in many cases are charged with procuring all manner of products and services. As such, interviewees indicated that awareness of the new top-down policy for Open Source preference was very low amongst public procurement officials. This does not yet account for an awareness of the latest changes to the law, which in turn might just motivate procurement officers to procure perceived “safe options” that have been procured in the past. Further, beyond simple awareness of new laws and any possible change to them, public administrations require support in implementing them correctly. Italy has 22,000 public administrations, all individually procuring IT solutions. The law only outlines the very basic requirements, yet public procurement is a highly complex procedure, subject to many legal competitiveness and innovation in the EU economy requirements. As in Germany, without clear implementation guidelines, procuring Open Source, which has monetary mechanisms different from those which apply to established proprietary software, is difficult to reconcile with existing practices. Interviewees indicated that procurement officers simply didn’t know how to perform the required “comparative analysis of conclusions” foreseen in Article 68 of the CAD in the absence of the guidelines from AgID. These guidelines were only published in May 2019, thus almost seven years after the new procurement preference came into force. It is therefore currently too early for a complete assessment to be made of the impact of the guidelines on the implementation of the procurement rules. The fact that AgID did not provide these important guidelines earlier is unlikely to result from a lack of motivation within the organisation to produce them; however, accounts indicate a lack of political and organisation support. The law adopted by the Italian Parliament initially gave AgID only a somewhat unclear mandate, yet the Italian government did convene a working group early in 2013 to define the guidelines. This group included stakeholders from the involved vested interests, but was concluded without any result being published. Lastly, the CAD does not foresee specific measures to enforce the rules in case of non- compliance, for example by penalties wielded against the responsible public procurement authority. Such strict enforcement does not seem to exist in any territory, but could increase the level of implementation. In addition one interviewee pointed out that procurement law (whether European or Italian) is difficult to enforce in practice, as case law created broad exceptions. As previously mentioned, the guidelines published in May 2019 are designed to address this lack of implementation of the Open Source preference in public procurement. The guidelines were drafted by AgID with the goal of taking into account the actual procurement processes of public administrations and of providing “ready-to-use” templates that would not only explain all important concepts required and guide procurement officers point-by- point through the process, but also allow them simply to attach the prepared documents to their procurement process without much additional work. To help public procurers to find suitable OSS and in order to support the implementation of Article 69 of the CAD (on sharing and re-use of software developed by Italian public authorities), the former Digital Team (now within the Ministry of Innovation) and AgID created Developers Italia. This platform enables public authorities and private companies to include their software in a catalogue of software suitable for use by public authorities. The platform is technically decentralised and scrapes information from third party software hostings, encoded in a prepared format, to be displayed on the platform. Currently it provides basic information on the software, who maintains it, a link to the code and documentation and which public administrations already use the software. One previously perceived issue which the platform has contributed to solving is the concern of public administrations that if they provide their software, they might be responsible for the provision of support to other public authorities the platform also lists the contact details of private support providers. It is hoped that Developers Italia could lead to additional business for companies and public authorities supplying OSS. As of July 2020, about 129 pieces of software were listed in the catalogue, of which 110 are provided by public authorities and 19 by private companies, and these solutions have been used 630 times. One interviewee reported increased interest in the products of companies which provide their solutions on the platform. Some regional public administrations have started to form communities around software projects (in some sense like consortia). These communities pool resources in developing, supporting and sometimes running software. [1] https://assets.innovazione.gov.it/1632481226-cnectopensourcestudyen2862021lmbhsihncec7jedshxkk1jlz079021.pdf _______________________________________________ nexa mailing list nexa@server-nexa.polito.it https://server-nexa.polito.it/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nexa
