Publicplan: Why we support the OSI

This week, we’re pleased to spotlight another OSI sponsor, publicplan, and learn why open source is important to their organization.

Publicplan develops open source software solutions for the digitization of administration in e-government. Its independent, adaptable, and sustainable solutions have improved communication between authorities, companies, and citizens since 2010.

We asked our sponsors at publicplan to share the organization’s intrinsic ties to open source, its reasons for supporting the Open Source Initiative, and its hopes for the open source movement. Here’s what they said:

Since its founding, publicplan has been committed to the concept of open source software. For us, there is no greater good than free information. As a service provider for the digitization of public administration in Germany, we are committed to the "public money, public code" thought, which says that software paid for with public money should always be public. The advantages clearly are transparency, security, collaboration and efficiency in the reusability of the software.

We chose to support the Open Source Initiative because it is one of the largest and most significant organizations dedicated to the promotion of open source software as well as the open source idea. Since these goals coincide with ours, a sponsorship was clearly the right way for us to work together.

The most important aspect for open source software is collaboration. Everyone can participate in developing and testing to improve the software. If companies use open source software without paying any fees, they can play a role in improving the software development in other ways. For example, they can participate in the development process or file bug reports, therefore ensuring that the software keeps improving over time.

Our most important goal is to get more free, open source software into public administration. Even though open source has finally arrived in the area of server and cloud infrastructure, the government sector in particular needs more courage to make use of open source software. The advantages are obvious.