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.
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!
How should we do that, Roberto?
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.
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!
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!
Hi Roberto,
you should ask Roberto Di Cosmo about the EDOS and MANCOOSI projects.
http://www.edos-project.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/WebHome
Cheers,
S. Fermigier
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.
@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 coveredR over 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.
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.
Hi Roberto,
about OOoCon, good idea! We are going to arrange a Document Interoperability Day where to invite all stake holders to discuss about the matter. You proposal fits perfectly! Would you like to contribute to the organization?
Yes Davide, I am happy to take the challenge, and make it a pragmatic event, towards real interoperability. I’ll come up with a proposal soon, as promised.
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.
Italian MEPs elected:
Sonia Alfano, Vittorio Prodi, Niccolò Rinaldi, Gianluca Susta, Patrizia Toia, Gianni Vattimo.
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.
Ehi Rob, how are u? I signal caro candidato dot org. There is no one italian candidate by right wing:
http://www.dariosalvelli.com/2009/06/alla-destra-italiana-non-piace-lopen-source
Take care!
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.
Thanks for pointing to my blog post. For your information Gartner presented open source as a disruptive innovation back in 2003-2004. And we’ve paid attention to open source for a long time. Jst, we’ve tried to keep a balanced view amidst strong opposition and religious fervor.
Hi Andrea,
I am glad you are joining the conversation. I pointed to your blog post because I think that the “easiness” of open source procurement is too often under considered.
About disruptive innovation what I said that Silver’s presentation missed to look at OOo from that perspective, it wasn’t a general assumption about Gartner’s vision on disruptive innovation.
Talking about Alfresco’s business strategy I happened to mention that the European open source observatory released guidelines for open source procurement.
The OSOR guideline draws on the extensive analysis conducted by the Dutch government’s OSOSS in 2005, followed by a guide published later by the successor organization to the OSOSS program (Netherlands Open in Verbinding).
Roberto Galoppini, 
Davide Dozza are discussing. 
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