What About Open Source for Europe?

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?

The North-American initiative is aimed at educating decision makers in the US government, was launched  encourage the Federal agencies to consider open source software in all of their procurement decisions and provide an effective voice to the government on behalf of the open source software community, private industry, academia, and other non-profits.

Europe seems to know about the role of open source, read the following excerpt:

For these reasons, exploiting the open source approach for strategic competition reasons and as a means to facilitate the diffusion of the results of the Framework Programme, should be stimulated broadly. As argued above it is particularly interesting for e-government applications and services.. Actually, the European Union may require that all the e-government software developed through funds provided to public institutions must be open to any other European Institution or body, who would be free to adapt and reuse it for its own purpose. This could be a driving and enabling factor that will facilitate the dissemination of European technology across the Union.

Maybe Europe should have a steering committees and a board of advisors too.

Transparency pays, and I believe that a number of open source companies, associations, universities and other organizations would be happy to help.

Thoughts?

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