Open source

For my Master’s thesis I wrote a report on open source software support in government organisations. This report concludes my Master programme in Technology and Policy at the Eindhoven University of Technology.

The report was written in cooperation with OSOSS, the Dutch government agency giving other government organisations information about the uses of open source. Besides this report I wrote a smaller, more practical version (in Dutch) intended for readers from government organisations.

This study explores how government organisations can organise support on open source software, when the organisation itself contributes to open source. Support on mature open source product was not studied, because there are very few support problems with it.

The analysis was done by case studied. A total of nine projects were studied, on different levels of government, both in the Netherlands, and abroad.

To analyse support the ASL framework was used. This framework was adapted in such a way that communities can be included in support. This report shows that communities around an open source project can play a major role in the support of the product, especially in maintenance and development, and to a lesser extend in user-to-user support. The report finished with recommendation on how support can be improved. This should primarily be done by strengthening the communities.

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Organising support on open source software in government organisations (scientific version)

Final presentation for the university (Dutch)

Ondersteuning op open source software (popular, Dutch version)



The Dutch, popular version written for OSOSS is licensed under a
Creative Commons Licence. The other two documents remain under regular copyright.