The Adoption Process of Free & Open Source Software (FOSS) in Turkish Public Organizations

Abstract

Free and open source software (FOSS) has been increasingly used both in public and private organizations in order to contain costs, increase software transparency and reliability, and information security, among other reasons. This article identifies and examines the arguments and actors, who have promoted and opposed the use of FOSS in the Turkish public sector. It also analyzes how these actors organize the processes of adoption and presents the discourses that they used to affect the open source-related policy decisions. The methods used e-mail questionnaires directed to IT experts in government, academia, private sector and the media, together with the archival analysis of related documents. It is found that FOSS enhances e-government implementations being relatively secure than proprietary software, low cost, participative, scalable and easy to manage. The article concludes with the evaluation of the current level of FOSS use in Turkish government agencies, an explanation of the process of adoption by presenting a process model of FOSS adoption in Turkey that may be applied in other similar countries and different frames of analysis that shape the adoption process. In this vein, the main aim is to link FOSS to the e-government processes and ultimate aim is to link this manuscript to the grass roots e-governance improvement literature.