Open Source Observatory

OSOR

Today, on the 26th of June, the Commission’s Open Source Observatory is revealing a new layout that reflects OSOR as a fundamental pillar of Interoperable Europe, the initiative of the European Commission for a reinforced public sector interoperability policy. The revamped graphic design also celebrates OSOR’s 15-year anniversary, the spirit of open collaboration, and the shared commitment of our European community to digital advancement.

OSOR organised the second webinar on "Policy & Strategy Aspects of OSS in Public Administration- Mapping the Public Sector's needs" which took place on Tuesday, 13 June 2023, from 1:00 pm to 3:00 pm CET. The event aimed to share knowledge and experiences regarding the implementation of Open Source Software (OSS) in the public sector. You can find all the presentations from this webinar at the end of this article.

The CMS Census tracks and analyses the content management systems used by different public organisations, giving insight into the popularity of Open Source solutions among them. The goal of the tracker is to give up-to-date information for decision-makers to choose the right software, help smaller user groups to find tooling for specific purposes and reduce vendor lock-in. It was developed with the needs of decision-makers, service providers, and CTOs in mind.

On Friday, June 9, 2023, the Dutch Open Source Program Office (OSPO) knowledge network, in a collaborative effort with OSPO++ and the informal OSPO network of the European Commission, held a groundbreaking meeting at the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations in The Hague. The session sought to underscore the transformational role of open source software (OSS) and the burgeoning OSPO phenomenon within the public sector.

Software licences attract less discussion than they did ten years ago, but there are still people working to improve the tools and licences. Joinup's Licence Wizard and Licensing Assistant (JLA) are two examples, but we'll look at some of the details first.

On 13 June, the World Health Organization (WHO) publicly unveiled its Open Source Programme Office (OSPO). This announcement came during an event focused on the importance and role of open-source technology in enhancing global readiness for emergencies.

BWI, the IT service provider for the German Armed Forces, has developed the BundesMessenger, a secure messaging platform based on open source technology. This platform, which has been in use by the Bundeswehr since 2021 under the name BwMessenger, is now being expanded for use in public administration.

“Open source, independence... These are elements that we want to implement in the service we are going to create.” On Thursday, 1 June, Florian Delezenne, the newly appointed head of the Interministerial Service Operator department at the French Interministerial Directorate for Digital Services (Dinum) was presenting the organisation’s new roadmap for a digital strategy aimed at improving the efficiency of public action in France.

When considering the adoption of open source software in public administrations, one of the questions that arises is the availability of existing solutions and how to find your way among them. There, it can be interesting to look at how countries outside the EU have structured their own overview of open source. The Japanese OSS Bird’s-eye View is in this regard an interesting alternative. It presents a visual summary of the complex and diverse existing open source solutions to help OSS beginners.

Akademy is a combination event that brings together the KDE community, which develops KDE Plasma, a customizable graphical desktop environment supporting virtual desktops and widgets as well as KDE Frameworks, a set of libraries and software frameworks based on Qt, and KDE Gear, which includes utility applications like Kdenlive or Krita.

The OSOR team just published the updated report on the state of Open Source in France. It describes the important advances and policy set up by the Dinum and its Free software Unit. In this report, you can read about the creation and responsibilities of the Free Software council and the 2021 Open Source Software and Digital Commons Action Plan. The report also includes the latest local initiatives and a list of actors who are active at the associative and governmental level in the use of open source. You can also find the factsheet summarizing these findings in a user-friendly way.

EU CAPTCHA is software which displays a "prove you are a human" test, such as bendy text or an image that you have to rotate until it's the right way up. This type of software is used on a large number of websites, so there is the potential for a company to track a user's online activity across many websites. EU-CAPTCHA, because it's free & open source software, and because it can be installed without needing a third-party service, offers a solution to this privacy issue. It also focusses on EU standards for accessibility, and it is available in the EU languages. It is available under a copyleft licence, the EUPL 1.2, and has recently been merged with the EUSurvey software which uses the same licence.