Let’s Discover more about Open Source EU Funded Initiatives
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!
Roberto Galoppini, 
Glyn Moody 2:30 pm on July 15, 2009 Permalink
How should we do that, Roberto?
Roberto Galoppini 2:51 pm on July 15, 2009 Permalink
Hi Glyn, I think just contacting people involved and analyzing deliverables.
Any other idea?
Update: On second thought, maybe asking projects’ owners to share projects’ Description of Work would be a first step in the right direction. Correspondences between the “expected†and the “actual†deliverables should come as the next step.
Juergen Geck 5:43 pm on July 15, 2009 Permalink
i don’t think we stand a chance to be comprehensive against the eu. just to entertain our worldwide audience (beware, slightly off topic), and to provide a measure of how broken this system is: http://tinyurl.com/nhut7v
maybe in an open source world of blogs we could catch up, but not for long … 🙂
and then there is the issue why this preference would be an issue. if open source is prefered, at least people get what they payed for, no?
a year ago in berlin i sat in the audience of a government sponsored meeting with lots of talk about open source and plenty of people from universities in the audience. i asked them “shouldnt the stuff you produce be available to those who pay for it?” the answer was a definite “yes, of course, but …”.
I for one like this imbalance towards open access to what i payed for!
Roberto Galoppini 8:30 pm on July 15, 2009 Permalink
Hi Jurgen, good to see you again.
My intention is definitely not to be against the EU. I rather want to put under the spot light projects that deserve attention, and I hope that many of them are worthy to look at. Nevertheless some of them could be promising on paper and pathetic in practice, but we aim to the truth, only the (open source) truth!
Stefane Fermigier 10:51 am on July 17, 2009 Permalink
Hi Roberto,
you should ask Roberto Di Cosmo about the EDOS and MANCOOSI projects.
http://www.edos-project.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/WebHome
http://www.mancoosi.org/
Cheers,
S. Fermigier
Roberto Di Cosmo 10:18 pm on July 19, 2009 Permalink
Hi Roberto,
being the coordinator of Mancoosi, one of the EU funded Open Source related projects, I have no problem in disclosing the precise scope of the project; actually, the description of work for Mancoosi has been online for almost a year now at http://www.mancoosi.org/deliverables/d1.1.pdf and the wonderful people I have the honor to coordinate in this project have been doing some impressive work, that everybody is very welcome to look at (see also http://blog.mancoosi.org).
But let me offer another suggestion: spending time scrutinizing the Open Source related EU projects to see if they have been conducted efficiently is surely interesting;
but it would be much more interesting to scrutinize EU-funded projects that produce *non-open source technolgy*: indeed, while badly managed open-source related projects may still give back EU citizens something for their money (the code), we can be sure that badly managed EU-funded projects producing closed source artefacts are just money thrown out of the window.
And while funding open-source related projects on public money can be justified simply on the basis of increasing the scientific commons, funding closed-source projects on public money can be justified only if some significant, tangible positive impact on the society can be achieved as a result; said in another way, the standards for scrutinizing publicly funded closed-source projects should be much higher.
Roberto Galoppini 12:17 pm on July 20, 2009 Permalink
@Stefane great to hear back from you, and I agree that both mancoosi and its predecessor EDOS are both great projects to look at.
@Roberto My main purpose is to help the dissemination process of both promising and interesting EU funded open source projects.
Take QualOSS, the first I covered
Rover this scrutiny phase: the project’s page had no page-rank until the day I blogged about it. Now it has been calculated and people googling around will get a chance to find it.Commercial exploitation of open source research results is definitely a better target for my blog than anything else, maybe someone else might look into the closed-source stuff.