I've also been thinking many times how cool it would be if somebody started creating an open source framework for EU e-government, considering that many problems are common to all governments.
I agree this would be brilliant. I know in the UK the gov.uk site is all open source: https://github.com/alphagov
They recently published a blog post about how the New Zealand Government Online team used some of the gov.uk code.
http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/2013/07/26/working-with-...
I'd love to see a pan-European initiative to pool resources and knowledge.
What I was thinking about was more of a grass-roots thing, started by hackers who want the e-government to come to the 21st century. Who knows, if my current startup turns out well and I'll have time to think about something different, I could work on that :)
These administrations basically have all the same needs, but many of them are served by small suppliers that always have to reinvent the wheel with some half-cooked proprietary solution.
If there was a well-designed, free open source GPL solution that already coverered 80% of the requirements, that could give a competitive advantage to those who based their offer on that solution. They would then compete only on service and customization.
As I see it, the problem would be mostly to kickstart the development of that GPL platform - no for-profit company could do that, it would be against their interest. But if a big and committed enough community started it, then it could create a positive feedback loop that could be very difficult to stop. IMHO this could be a field where the GPL could give its best (I'm not pasdaran of the GPL, and released my own little open source contributions as MIT).
However, even with the software being perfect, you still have very high barriers of entry to overcome: 1) the local authority is likely to be locked into a 5- or 10-year contract with its current supplier 2) the choice of supplier is rarely (if ever) based on technical excellence/licensing strategy. Usually the people commissioning the IT don't tend to have a very deep understanding of technology, licensing, etc
As for the contracts, at least in Italy I've never seen one longer than 3 years, and practically by law the deciding factor is, most of the time, price (which is a big problem on its own).