European Open Source Haystacks
The EU now provides a search tool to find applications among the 1751 open source development projects hosted on ten federated forges managed by Austrian, French, Italian and Spanish public administrations.
The new search engine basically relies on an automatic translation service, translating projects’ descriptions in English.
Open source projects for public administrations are typically designed by SMEs to be compliant with local laws and customs. The authors work on a local or regional basis, national at best, therefore the programs usually have no multi-language support.
Talking with Szabolcs Szekacs, OSOR project officer at IDABC, I expressed the opinion that an open source code search engine would raise more interest.
Unisys OSOR Technical Manager said that all federated forges use GForge made “relatively simple to access all of the projects”.
GForge?
FLOSSMetrics can extract interesting pieces of information just from projects hosted on GForge (and SourceForge) platforms, a synergy that should definitely be considered to further enhance OSOR functionalities. All in all people looking for projects need a method to assess open source projects’ quality before investing time and effort to exploit them.
The European Information Society DG has a dedicated website aimed at raising awareness and understanding of free and open source software, a good starting point to share useful information on activities conducted within European initiatives with the objective of FLOSS.
Michel Lacroix – European Commission, DG Information Society, unit D3, Software & Service Architectures and Infrastructures – is supposed to be the right person to talk to to give some feedback, as suggested by the contacts page.
I mailed him just before the summer, and I look forward to speak with him about actions and objectives around open source dissemination.
Roberto Galoppini and 
Jesus M. González Barahona 6:20 pm on August 31, 2009 Permalink
Well, I’m not that sure about your proposal of looking for *code*. In the case of OSOR, the idea seems to be to link with other sites devoted to libre software for public administrations. Working at the package (or poroject) level, seems to me about right. When you’re looking for some piece of code, the domain of the program probably doesn’t matter that much…
In other words, if you’re looking for some package which may be useful for public administrations, looking at OSOR and federated forges seems reasonable. But if you are looking for a specific piece of code (even if it is for a software to be used in PA), the search should be much wider: probably almost any forge could have the piece you want).
WRT FLOSSMetrics, indeed we’re focused on GForge-like forges (including SourceForge), but we can extract data from any public repository in any forge, provided we have its url, and the kind of repository is supported by our tools. Currently that amounts to CVS, Subversion, git and (limited) Bazaar for SCM, Bugzilla and SourceForge for bug reporting systems, and mbox for mailing lists repositories. More are supposed to come.
Yes, I fully agree that the services provided by FLOSSMetrics could be integrated with OSOR, or with any other forge, for that matter. SourceForge is starting that way (not with FLOSSMetrics, but with their own machinery), and OSOR also started it, offering graphs about the evolution of some parameters related to the activity of the projects (in this case, using a part of the FLOSSMetrics toolchain).
Just to finish, thanks a lot for reporting on FLOSSMetrics, and for taking the time to understand it!
[Disclamer: I’m coordinator of the FLOSSMetrics project, and also involved in the OSOR as a member of the consortium maintaining it]
Roberto Galoppini 7:04 pm on August 31, 2009 Permalink
Hi Jesus,
glad to see you joining the conversation.
As I wrote in my blog post most of the times open source projects for public administrations are lead by SMEs thinking and acting locally. Translating projects’ descriptions can hardly help the share and reuse of knowledge in the context of IT, I am afraid.
Krugle code search engine or similar technology might help to search pieces of code that perform more specific tasks, and eventually reuse code made available from other EU public administrations under the EUPL (apparently designed to ease the licensing burden).
Taking advantage only of code hosted on federated forges may result in a lack of opportunity anyway, either if you look for a whole package or a library. In other words, I am assuming that we need of OSOR here, and the EUPL license may well be the reason for that.
I wish to report more about FLOSSMetrics, let’s keep in touch for writing a specific blog post on project’s final findings.