Two Open Source Software (OSS) projects in Tanzania are discussed as exemplar efforts for the adaptation and use of OSS in public sector. The projects investigated in this Action Research Study were from the Health and Education Sectors. The two projects are of important in that, they use two different approaches of embracing OSS where the Health Sector project uses an approach of getting existing and working open source software framework and customizes it with the help of contributors from Open Source Community, while the Education Sector project developed software from scratch under the auspice of OSS development approach. A comparative analysis of the two projects with the terms of the Open Source Software definition indicates that the two developed software did not take into consideration of all OSS terms. The study concludes that the deviation from the terms of OSS definition reflect incompatibility between free software and open source software philosophies which results into difficulties to comply with one of them. As a result the focus is to achieve the freedom to use the software for any purpose and for any number of computers and the freedom to maintain the software without depending on the author of the software.