Sweden

Swedish government recommends public institutions to judge Free Software and proprietary software on an even basis in the public procurement processes.

Contracting authorities in Sweden may require ICT standards as mandatory if these meet the requirement of an "Open Standard" as defined in the European Union’s Interoperability Framework (EIF v 1.0). Other technical specifications can only be used as ‘evaluation criteria’. Currently the list of "Open IT-Standards" includes 46 standards that meet the criteria listed in EIF v. 1.0. To make it to the list, IT standards must be developed openly and publicly. The standard must not constrain reuse of the standard, and intellectual property (patents) should be made freely available.

According to the study for the country’s Ministry of Enterprise and Innovation conducted in 2016, in general, Free Software is common in data centre environments, where it is used for web and application servers. Free Software is also more prevalent in central government organisations than in local administrations.

Examples include the National Heritage Board which switched its entire database environment to Postgresql and the Social Insurance Agency replaced a mix of proprietary server operating systems with Linux-based servers in 2014 and 2015.

Sweden has 10 democratic and governmental organisations instating tools and initiatives on the line of Free Software. These have used 8 different Free Software licenses and range from the Swedish Pensions Agency to library services to a state museum for the country's maritime history.