“In October 2002, a commission for free software in public
administration was established to study open source adoption. in
May 2003 CNIPA (Centro Nazionale per l’Informatica della Pubblica
Amministrazione) published a study that recommended (amongst other
things) that public offices should neither prohibit nor penalize
the use of OSS packages. A working group later produced guidelines
as to how to remain compliant with the recommendations.“The Italian government put its money where its mouth was in
December 2006 as Italian budget law committed €30m over three
years to projects that stimulate the information society (although
what happened to those funds is open to question) while in May 2007
Italy launched its own repository of open source software for
public administrations, the Collaborative Development
Environment…”