The European Commission has awarded UK consultancy Netproject a pilot contract to examine deployment of open source software in government departments.

The contract, valued at €250,000 (£160,000), is for work to be carried out in the German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. The work will last five months and concentrate on how to migrate smoothly from existing systems to Linux. It is the clearest signal yet that the Commission favours the use of open source software in the public sector.

"The EC wants people to understand the issues involved in deploying open source," said Netproject director Eddie Bleasdale.

The mandate is to look at deployment including small distributed organisations - which is why the east German state was chosen - and also larger organisations, so the German government is also interested."

He said the debate had moved beyond whether to use open source as the cost of ownership benefits were well understood. But computer systems had grown in a topsy-turvy manner and were not designed to work together.

"If we're to move forward we need to build a new architecture that looks at the whole infrastructure," Bleasdale said.

For e-government to work a secure trusted desktop computer was particularly important, Bleasdale added. "You can go the Microsoft Palladium route or you can look at Linux and open source, and Netproject is firmly in the latter camp," he said.

The investigation will consider Linux and open source applications for both servers and desktops and in both local and central government. It will include authentication of users and authorisation of what resources can be accessed.

Bleasdale said the suggested desktop could well have smartcard access because user name and password was not secure enough.

After the report was submitted, he said, the EC could take the recommendations and build pilot systems. He added that a demonstration of what had been achieved for West Yorkshire Police was quite likely.