There was a lot of interest in OSOR's presentation on the Interoperable Europe Act at FOSDEM. The questions & answers session highlighted that interoperability is part of a list of topics where the FOSS community would like to see helpful legislation. The room was full, and discussions continued afterward in the hallway.
Dutch Minister for Digitalisation Alexandra van Huffelen announced the creation of a national Open Source Programme Office (OSPO) for the Netherlands, with the goal of looking at not just the technical issues but also the cultural and organisational issues of using FOSS in the Dutch public administration. She specifically highlighted a need to change the culture of closedness that currently exists in public administrations, despite civil servants’ best efforts.
At the same time, the French Ministry of Education published its Digital Strategy which recommands various FOSS applications for use by teachers for online classes and for making files and videos available to students. This move is motivated by sovereignty, security, freedom and community, which shows how much progress has been made in the understanding of FOSS, compared to older discussions which focussed on the budgetary benefits.
In Ireland, the YERUN Open Science Award was given to Lero’s Open Science Committee for their work in bringing in an “open by default” policy for publishing research papers, software and data. Lero is the software research centre of Ireland’s national body for strategic funding of oriented basic and applied research in STEM areas.
Luxembourg’s government has also announced that they will set up a chat service which will be built on Matrix, which is a FOSS communication suite that is already being used by the German armed forces, the French government, and multiple agencies of the Swedish public administration. The government’s system will be available for use by citizens, under the name “Luxchat”, and an instance running on separate servers for government use, under the name “Luxchat4gov”.
OSOR’s series of interviews continued with a discussion with Jörg Wurzer of Volla Phone about the status of FOSS on smartphones—a category of computers that’s often overlooked when thinking about digital sovereignty. Dr Wurzer discusses the consequences for data privacy, the difficulties for smaller businesses to operate in this market, and how operating systems and devices can create dependencies to other services such as cloud storage.
Lastly, Free Software Foundation (FSF) continues its work to update its by-laws and is accepting nominations for their Board of Directors. They have also formalised the role of the Board of Directors in stewardship of the GNU GPL. Versions 2 and 3 of the GNU GPL are both listed in the EUPL’s Appendix of Compatible Licences, so code released under the EUPL could later be distributed under the GNU GPL. With so many government bodies increasing their expertise in FOSS, experts from public administration may be interested in getting involved in its stewardship.
Use of the EUPL, which is available in 23 languages of the EU, also continues to grow. A recent example is provided by the German Federal Office for Information Security, who released their TaSK Framework tool under the EUPL. This tool includes an implementation of TLS (Transport Layer Security)—a cryptographic protocol that is a core part of people’s daily use of secure communication and payments on the Internet.
2023 is already off to a good start, so we hope to have more good news to report in March!
The OSOR Team
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