The Hungarian government has announced that it will be modifying procurement rules to allow open source to be used in public sector organisations. Previously, procurement rules had apparently named vendors such as Microsoft and Novell. The new rules, according to Ferenc Baja, deputy minister for information technology, will allocate the same amount of money to acquiring open source products as to proprietary products. The move was announced at a press conference on April 2nd.

This means that a budget of around 40 million euros will be available to be tendered for by open source vendors as part of the centralised tendering process. The idea is to provide a fair competition and to entice companies into the open source mindset.

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