In February 2005, Roberto Di Cosmo gave a presentation at my University about “Free Software and Public Administration” (I commented on it at that time). Now, thanks to the work of Marco Cova, the video of that presentation is available on archive.org. Check also the slides of that talk or the collection of his other slides. Di Cosmo’s final point is that the Public Administration is not a big enterprise but that it has specific needs and these needs mandate that the Public Administration chooses Free Software (ALSO if it costs more that proprietary software). His presentation was wonderful, full of real and convincing examples and very very clear: just imagine that he was able to explain to a non-techy audience a concept such as “a compiler used to compile the compiler”!
The talk was in Italian so, if you don’t know it, can you imagine a better reason for learning it than watching this video? ;-)