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Tryggvi Bjorgvinsson, the head of a project aimed at analyzing open-source adoption in government organizations, said that schools have been an important part of Iceland's migration.

"Public institutions have slowly been migrating to free software over the last four years. This school year, 2011-2012, two new secondary schools moved their systems entirely to free and open source software, bringing the count to five out of 32 schools," he said in a published by the European Commission.

Iceland is far from the only government looking to adopt open-source software, however. Projects like the ambitious being jointly undertaken by the U.S. Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs are becoming increasingly common across the developed world.

Generally lower costs and the ability to avoid restrictive licensing terms are key motivators for the interest in open source among governments, particularly in light of tight budgetary conditions in many countries. However, curiosity about open-source in general and in particular predates the recent recession. The French Gendarmerie Nationale began a move to Linux in 2006, , and saved millions of dollars over the next three years.