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Ever more code going online
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With public administrations hosting public git repositories and publishing their own work under Free and Open Source Software licences, it's easy to forget that only ten years ago we were happy when we saw Free and Open Source Software even being used. At that time the issues of flexibility and sovereignty were not understood and price was the focus of discussions. Today, adoption is soaring and price has taken a back seat to discussions of customisation, control, transparency and auditing.
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The licensing aspects are now understood. The development methods are being adopted at great speed. Interaction of public administrations with the wider open source community still needs work, but many medium-to-large public administrations have set up Open Source Programme Offices to work on this. It's quite a culture change, moving from their traditional relationship with software to a new relationship where they are both users and contributors, and where they can interact directly with not only the developers but the other users too.
The biggest such news this month was the announcement by the European Commission of their new git code repository for the EU institutions, code.europa.eu. Director-General Veronica Gaffey announced that they already have more than 100 projects and 150 developers and that they are "busily onboarding more". Gaffey also discussed the Commission's desire to grow from “an organisation that consumes open source to one that builds its own solutions on open source, to ultimately a Commission that is closely involved in open source”.
A similar project has also recently been upgraded from "pilot" to "production" in Germany. This repository has already been online for half a year and was used during the pilot stage for collaboration between two of Germany's regions. As we can see already in the repository, local administrations are using it to share configurations, tools and to agree on software versions. There is also a forum where implementers can exchange know-how about the various solutions.
One of the cultural differences is the emphasis that open source developers put on making their code readable and reusable. Open Source developers want more people reading their code. In this respect, Nos Gestes Climat is a good example of public administration getting it right. The code began life as a set of accountancy simulators that the French government hoped would help individuals and companies understand the tax obligations of various situations. The code was reused by futur.eco to create simulators for CO2 footprint, and this code was reused by Nos Gestes Climat to create an overview of annual CO2 footprint as well as recommendations, specific to your situation, for how your CO2 footprint can be reduced.
Another example of the emphasis on community can be seen in the approach to Free and Open Source Software conferences—these are often recorded and made available online for anyone who couldn’t attend. One example from September was Open Source Driving the European Digital Decade, Brno, Czech Republic. This was the venue of the announcement of code.europa.eu as well as presentations by Petra Dzurovcinova, CIO, City of Bratislava and Jiří Hlavenka, Governor of South Moravian Region for Innovation and Digitisation. Another example from September was the Linux Foundation’s Community Leadership Conference with panels and presentations on how to build and grow a community, as well as working with policy and public administration.
We hope you all had an enjoyable summer break, but Open Source never stops and there are many things in the pipeline for OSOR which you will see online in the coming days, weeks and months.
The OSOR Team
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Latest News
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CO2 reduction simulator builds upon open-source accounting code
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With worries of big household energy bills this winter, carbon footprint calculators may find a new use as people look for ways to analyse their energy use. "Nos Gestes Climat" (Our Climate Actions) is a piece of software that already does part of this job, and its history shows how an open source project found new purposes addressing some of the most pressing needs of today.
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Open Source code repository for the EU institutions launched by DIGIT Director-General Gaffey
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On Friday 16 September, Director-General for Informatics Veronica Gaffey announced the launch of the Commission's open source repository for the EU institutions: code.europa.eu. She reported that there are already over 100 projects and 150 developers on the platform, and that the Commission's Open Source Programme Office is "busily onboarding others".
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Germany's opencode.de goes into production use
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Germany's Online Access Act defines a list of 575 public services that must be provided online, and requires that these be implemented through "openness" - a concept which the government's implementation guide explains as meaning that source code is published as open source and components are checked for reusability.
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Presentations on working with project communities
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Videos from the recent Community Leadership Conference are now online for anyone interested in learning about interacting with or integrating into Free and Open Source Software communities.
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Free and Open Source event in the Czech Republic
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On 16 September, the Czech Presidency of the European Council co-organised an event on Free and Open Source Software in Brno, Czech Republic with panel discussions which included government and public sector representatives from the Czech Republic, France, Sweden and Slovakia.
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Award for collaborative maps in Nextcloud
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The Commission and Nextcloud have awarded EUR 5,000 to a software developer based in Austria. He contributed a map-sharing application to Nextcloud that makes it easy for users to collaborate on geographic maps, and then share these with others.
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Tackling The Challenges Of Software Provision
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Under the title "Tackling The Challenges Of Software Provision", Peter Vogt (European Commission, Joint Research Centre (JRC), Ispra, Italy, and Pierrick Rambaud (United Nations FAO, Rome, Italy) explore the full cycle of software provision and detail how choosing the appropriate license for a given software project requires a good deal of thought and rationale to ensure all legal aspects are addressed in an adequate way, and covered also for future software developments.
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The future of law-making in the European Union – open source, of course!
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The European Commission Open Source Programme Office reflects on the sixth LEOS community webinar and the contribution by Martine Deprez, Director of Decision-making and Collegiality at the Commission’s Secretariat-General.
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Key takeaways from the OSOR webinar on public procurement of open source software
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On 23 May, the OSOR community joined the webinar on public procurement of open source software. It started with an overview of the soon-to-be-published updated Guidelines on Public Procurement of Open Source Software and was followed by presentations by Johan Linåker, senior researcher at the Research Institute of Sweden (RISE), Rasmus Frey, Head of Secretariat at OS2 (Denmark), and Patrice-Emmanuel Schmitz, a legal expert and one of the authors of the original Guidelines on Public Procurement of Open Source Software. Links to the recording of the event and the supporting presentations are available at the bottom of this page.
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The Swedish Agency for Digital Government reports their licensing policies
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Under the title “Rekommendation om öppna licenser och immaterialrätt” (Recommendation on open licenses and intellectual property rights) the Swedish policy details the licensing options regarding the distribution or communication of both public sector data and computer source code.
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Successful NextGov hackathon
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The Commission and Nextcloud have awarded EUR 5,000 to a software developer based in Austria. He contributed a map-sharing application to Nextcloud that makes it easy for users to collaborate on geographic maps, and then share these with others.
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Upcoming Events
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Latest Studies
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Public services should sustain Critical open source software
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European public services should actively contribute to the long-term sustainability of the open source software they use, by supporting long-term maintenance projects rather than purely focusing on new projects. This is one of the key findings of the FOSSEPS Critical Software Study Report published today.
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