A European Commission working paper on linking national government IT systems across Europe is recommending open source software.
The paper, Linking up Europe: the Importance of Interoperability for E-government Services, stressed that the planned European interoperability framework should be "based on open standards and encourage the use of open source software".
Andy Butler, vice president at analyst Gartner, described it as "a loaded statement" which will be "very provocative".
He warned that it would be a mistake to equate open source with open systems, and pointed out that there will always be cases when proprietary applications are preferable to open source.
"There are some people in Europe who are passionate about open source. For them, Linux is not an operating system but a religion and they could start to go over the top," said Butler.