“equally critical of proprietary and open source myths, advocating software choice beyond marketing and romanticism”
Tim O’Reilly yesterday at OSCON during his keynote unveiled the Open Source for America, which includes industry and thought leaders of the open source world in its membership, and is meant to provide:
“unified voice to help effect change in U.S. Federal Government policies and practices to allow the federal government to better utilize open source software for cost efficiency, security and enhanced performance.”
Do we need to run a similar initiative here, in Europe?
MEPs candidates before the European elections have been called upon to pledge their committment to digital freedoms, 34 of them have now been elected.
The Italian Association Assoli launched a campaign to provide a reality check for MEPs to see if they are committed.
Belgium, France, Spain, and UK might well adopt a similar approach, I think.
As mentioned before, sometimes EU funded projects overlap. Asking around about European open source initiatives, I happened to get in touch with Paul Adams. Apparently Paul is the only person who has worked on each of the three projects to whom the EC asked to collaborate, and I asked him more about such cooperation.
Continue reading ‘About Open Source EU Funded Projects Overlapping’
The European Commission when assigning funds sometimes paid little attention to projects’ overlapping, that it comes with no surprise considering that they don’t keep updated the European F/OSS-related research activities page.
Jean-Christophe Deprez - QualOSS project coordinator - in a email conversation told me that the EC eventually realized it, and asked few EC-funded projects to collaborate, as results from the Flossquality initiative.
Collection, aggregation and correlation of data fetched by open source public repositories is of great help when you need to assess open source product quality. Let’s see how things are going at QualOSS and what should we expect from them in the next future.
Having been both critical and supportive of some EU funded open source projects in the 6th framework program, I wish to have a look at promising or creditworthy open source related projects backed by the EU.
The Association for Competitive Technology criticized what they consider a bias in favour of open-source software in the European Commission’s plans. I wish to help to give public evidence revealing how our money has been spent on open source initiatives so far, possibly accelerating the dissemination process of results and findings.
Just raise your hand and let your voice be heard!
Rajiv Shah and Jay Kesan wrote the paper “running code as part of an open standards policy” arguing that the “running code” requirement - i.e. multiple independent, interoperable implementations of an open standard - should be part of governments’ open standards policies.
Last week the Dutch government hosted the first ODF plugfest: creators, implementors and end-users met up to improve OpenDocument interoperability for real, and it worked out well.
Continue reading ‘ODF Interoperability: Rough Consensus and Running Code’
Italian MEPs of the past legislation are told to be the best paid for least work, for sure was not easy to build fruitful relationships with most of them about digital freedom issues.
Newly-elected Italian MEPs are not much interested into these matters, only six of them actually signed the Caro Candidato Campaign (part of the “free software pact” initiative).
Marco Cappato, one of the most active on those issues, is out because his party is below the 4% threshold.
Noticing that few Italian candidates signed the free software pact, I got a reaction from the Italian MEP Marco Cappato, who sent me an email to tell my readers about the importance of digital freedoms.
Assoli today announced that under the free software pact initiative 232 Italian candidates signed the “caro candidato” pact. Candidates signing it state that they favor the development and use of free software, and will protect it from threatening EU legislation.
Only 27 MEP candidates subscribed until now, I hope more will pop up before the elections, Europe needs MEPs informed on free software issues.
Few days ago the Italian MEP Marco Cappato made public a EC report
analyzing the feasibility of a migration to open source software on desktop workplaces.
The study was conducted in 2005, and contains two deck of slides from Gartner’s analysts Michael Silver and Nikos Drakos. Both presentations are worth reading, even if some guesses are not supported by facts.
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