Voting for the OSOR Community Award remains open until 30 October. If you haven’t already, we invite you to take a look at the candidate projects and vote for your favourite. Interest has been great and we look forward to meeting members of the projects, the voting public and many others who follow OSOR at the conference. It’s a full-day, in-person event but streaming will also be available.

And that’s not the only thing we’re busy with. AI news seems to be popping up everywhere, and the OSOR newsletter is no exception! Hot on the heels of France’s announcement, Estonia has now announced investing €20 million into "open source, reusable AI solution building blocks". Estonia’s interest in AI and in FOSS is not new, but this is one of the largest investments from an EU government.

Germany’s also not being left behind. Schleswig-Holstein has announced development of an AI language model so that the public administration can make use of this technology without sending data abroad and without becoming dependent on a third party. This work will be in collaboration with Nextcloud and will be "100% open source".

There’s also some conceptual work happening in certain circles on what it means for an AI system to be "open source". What we today call open source or free software, has always been defined by being able to use, study, modify and redistribute the source code. But an AI system is a small amount of software and a lot of data. Without the data the system does nothing, but applying the definition to data isn’t straightforward, so, when is an AI system "open source"? Open Source Initiative is consulting with interested parties to work on a definition.

Meanwhile, Sonatype published an interesting study on FOSS supply chains. Among the highlights are that supply chains are "one of the fastest growing vectors for adversaries to execute malicious code", and that 96% of the time when a software component with a vulnerability is downloaded, a fixed version was already available. The OSOR news item compares this study to two other recent publications from Linux Foundation and from Tidelift.

Another study looked more broadly at The State of European Open Source Innovation, Opportunities, and Challenges. A similarity to highlight among each of the above-mentioned studies is the interest in going into detail on what might not be working or could be underperforming. The transparency of free and open source software makes this type of third-party review possible. The same problems could exist for proprietary software but the users aren’t able see what’s going on. One highlight of this study, by Linux Foundation, was that when they asked users if the value they had gotten from FOSS in the past year had increased, 59% of the private sector said yes, but only 37% of the public sector.

Of course, there are also positive examples that the use of FOSS is indeed growing in the public sector. In Paris, the Capytale platform, based on Bashton, is being used for digital education. And not only is the software released under a FOSS licence, but the education materials are Creative Commons share-alike and the system is designed to encourage creating a sharing community. In Flanders too, Belgium, a new platform provides a search engine for the contents of museums, reusing software from Project Blacklight and from LibreCat.

All in all, another busy month in the FOSS ecosystem, and it’s really motivating for OSOR to see all the different ways people are finding to use FOSS to improve how digital technology affects our daily lives. We hope to see you on 21 November!

The OSOR Team