Open Source Observatory

OSOR

In February 2020, European Commission agents received a communication encouraging them to use the messaging service Signal. The Signal messaging service is an open source and fully encrypted alternative to proprietary solutions.

The provincial council of Bizkaia, one of the provinces of the Basque Country in Spain, is letting companies and citizens run experiments with its blockchain platform in the hope of spinning off useful public and commercial services. “We consider this part of the public infrastructure, similar to roads or healthcare,” explains Valentin Garcia Souto, head of development and innovation at the IT department of the Diputación Foral de Bizkaia.

On Tuesday 11 February, the OSOR community gathered for a webinar to discuss the functionalities of the OSOR platform and its new Knowledge Centre. Attendees shared their feedback and ideas on OSOR, its scope, and most importantly they shared their needs. Thank you for helping us tailor OSOR to your needs!

For the government of Estonia, open source is always a priority, says the country’s Chief Data Officer, Ott Velsberg. “Everything we do, including artificial intelligence, should be open source if there are no reasons not to,” Mr Velsberg told the European Commission’s Open Source Observatory.

Actum Digital, a Czech software company, is considering publishing the code of the road tax portal that was created during a weekend hackathon at the end of January. Publication would allow others to evaluate the quality of the code and the scope of the services it provides. However, the software cannot be shared as open source, says Actum CEO Tomáš Vondráček: “We agreed with the hackathon participants that the rights would be passed to us, and that the work would be given to the Czech state for free.”

Availability as open source is not a requirement for entries to the GeoChallenge competition for geographic solutions launched by Belgium’s Walloon region. However, “[open source] will not be neglected in our reflection,” says Emmanuel Jauquet, one of the organisers of the competition, who works for the Walloon government’s Department of Geomatics.

Five years after the creation of its Open Source Working Group, the City of Dortmund published several reports on the “Investigation of the potential of Free Software and Open Standards”. The reports share the city of Dortmund’s open source policy goals as well as its ambition to create an alliance of municipalities in favour of open source software.

The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) has decided to discontinue the use of the Facebook collaboration app Workplace, instead opting to replace it with Mattermost, an open source messaging app. CERN switched to open source software after changes to Facebook’s solution subscription prices and possible changes in the data security settings.

Launched in 2019, the EU-funded CityLoops project aims to tackle the issue of excessive construction and organic waste, which are two of the most significant urban material flows. Using the principles of circular economy, CityLoops project will develop a series of innovative procedures, approaches and open source tools to recycle waste. The project, which will run until 2023, already released open source tools including an open source web-based Material Flow Analysis tool as well as numerous training resources.

In Germany, one in every three large companies is involved in developing open source software, according to a survey published by Bitkom, a German IT and telecommunications industry association. About half of these firms let staff participate in open source projects, and almost 40% of them are paying members or sponsors of open source organisations.

Universities and academic research networks across Europe are building a giant “science cloud” by scaling up open source solutions for synchronising and sharing data. The researchers are “following the open-source strategy for delivering services” to tie together their local implementations into an integrated network.

Want to know more on the state of play of open source software in Germany? This factsheet will help you to have an overview of policies and existing legal frameworks throughout the country as well as open source software initiatives.

Want to know more on the state of play of open source software in France? This factsheet will help you to have an overview of policies and existing legal frameworks throughout the country as well as open source software initiatives?

Want to know more on the state of play of open source software in Slovenia? This factsheet will help you to have an overview of policies and existing legal frameworks throughout the country as well as open source software initiatives.