Orvieto Food Festival – a gourmet happening that will be held from 18-21 November in Orvieto, with wine, food, culture and fair trade initiatives – invited me to give a speech about how to mix proprietary and open source.
Consip – the Italian public stock company owned by the Ministry of the Economy and Finance and responsible for the rationalization of Public Purchases – is hosting an event about electronic purchase of open source services.
The event, that is part of the Open Source Focus Group for Public Administrations series, will be focuses on how the award-winning Italian Public Administration Electronic Marketplace (MEPA) can ease open source procurement processes.
I look forward to moderate the final round-table to stimulate a discussion about ongoing actions and perspectives.
The upcoming European Commission Future Networks concertation meeting next week will host an “Open source & Research” panel (agenda), and I’m honoured to have been invited to join it.
Having been writing about EU-funded open source research for a while now – sometimes interacting with running projects, other times helping them to be more visible, but also criticizing some for not being effective or to produce poor deliverables – I am very much willing to address the sustainability aspects of open source projects and the commercial viability of open source from framework programme projects.
Roberto,
I must say it was great the way you preemptively published this post before the actual event. I managed to show it during the meeting, and now many months later I’ve completed a short review post on the event.
http://www.tssg.org/blog/miguelpdl/archives/2010/10/open_source_fp7.html
Thanks again for you input on this.
Miguel.
Hi Roberto.
I have a question for you. Are they allowed to write in a tender dossier in an EU funded project that the software “MUST NOT be made available by the manufacturer under free software license – GPL or similar”. Is this legal?
Thanks,
Andrei
Dear Andrei,
let me answer you bringing some other related issues on the table.
Probably you know that EU projects must have a Consortium Agreement in place, and such consortium agreement regards the internal organisation of the consortium (included IPR) and it doesn’t involve the European Commission.
Now, there are some templates for these Consortium Agreements, a well-known one is the one by EICTA (.doc document). You might want to take note of section 4.2.7.3, especially the excerpts below.
(i) The Parties acknowledge that the use within the Project of Software that is “open source” (as defined at http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php), and/or the release of Foreground upon licence terms associated with such Software, may have benefits for the conduct of the Project and promote the Use and dissemination of the resulting Foreground. However, they also recognise that certain of such licence terms (namely Controlled Licence Terms) may restrict the options that are available for Use and dissemination of the resulting Foreground, and accordingly they wish to regulate, in accordance with this Section 4.2.7.3 the use of Controlled Licence Terms in relation to the Project and Use and dissemination of the results thereof.
(ii) Without limiting the scope of this Section 4.2.7.3, the Parties acknowledge that the use in the Project or introduction into the Project of Background, Sideground or other Work held by a Party pursuant to Controlled Licence Terms [read “open source”, as explained in (i)] may impair or otherwise affect the other Parties’ utilisation or Use of or Access Rights to Background, Sideground, Foreground or other Work. Each Party shall therefore abstain from using in the Project or introducing into the Project any Background, Sideground or other Work in a manner or upon terms that would or might result in a requirement that all or some of the Foreground, Sideground, Background or any other Work must, either generally or under certain circumstances, be licenced under Controlled Licence Terms, unless all Parties have unanimously approved in writing such use or introduction.
(iii) Following the signature of this CA, any Party that is seeking such approval shall provide the other Parties with a written request for approval (“Request”) containing sufficient information, substantially in the format set out in Annex 5 hereto, to enable each of them to assess whether the introduction or use of the Background, Sideground, Foreground or other Work in question, upon the Controlled Licence Terms that are applicable to it, would or might result in any requirement referred to in paragraph (ii) above. Each Party shall inform the Co-ordinator in writing within 60 days from receipt of the Request whether or not it approves the use or introduction for which approval is requested in the Request. Any Party that fails to respond to a Request within the above period shall be notified by the Co-ordinator that it has a further 7 days to respond and in the absense of a response from such Party within such further period it shall be deemed to have approved the Request. As soon as possible after the lapse of such 60 day period (and any further periods as above), the Co-ordinator shall inform all Parties in writing whether or not such use or introduction has been unanimously approved. However, no approval of any Request shall constitute an agreement pursuant to paragraph (b) below that any Foreground may be sub-licensed on Controlled Licence Terms.
As you can see, unless projects members don’t unanimously agree about the use of an open source licenses, it can be cumbersome at best to decide it at a later stage, and this is definitely no good in my opinion. Templates should be more favorable towards the creation, the use (and therefore re-use) of open source deliverables, because is us paying for such research projects.
So said, I don’t think the EU is imposing any restriction in EU FP7 calls or similar tenders, but I guess in some special cases it might legally occur for a reason (e.g. a tender may require some sort of integration with a proprietary product posing specific limitations towards some open source licenses).
Hope it helps.
Legautonomie – the Italian league for local autonomies (municipalities, provinces and mountain communities) – is organizing a seminar about the impact of the national digital reform on local governments.
The event will be held in Pisa, on the 25th of October, I’ll give the closing speech talking about cloud computing and open source.
CDTI – the Association of IT Professionals based in Rome – and the Italian biweekly newspaper “Corriere delle Comunicazioni” are organizing a one day event around cloud computing on Wednsday 13 October, at the National Central Library. (More …)
Hi Roberto,
May I share information about this Cloud Computing Conference among my colleagues on ITEvent.net?
Thanks!
–Tim.
Yes Tim, feel free to report about them, stay tuned for more (March and June, dates to be defined).
Open source licensing compliance will be at the center of the next conference of the “Focus Group Open Source” series, an initiative sponsored by IBM Italy to promote open source among Italian public administrations. (disclosure: IBM Italy is a client).
Marco Ciurcina, lawyer and Vice-President of the Italian association devoted to the promotion of free software (Assoli), will introduce the legal aspects of free software and open source licensing. Sebastiano Lomuscio, Consip, will give a speech around open source licenses and public administrations, while Carlo Vaccari will close the round-table talking about how ISTAT found its way to the EUPL.
A question and answer session and a public discussion will follow the round table.
The Jury of the Open Innovation Awards 2010 – the international competition for Open Source projects being organized as part of the Open World Forum in Paris on 1 October 2010 – has published the list of finalists.
The award is organized by the Open World Forum with operational support being provided by the GT Logiciel Libre (free software) of the Systematic competitiveness cluster. The full list of the nominated companies and jury’s members are reported below.
Red Hat Italia is organizing an executive meeting in Milan, on the 28th of September 2010. The event will focus on how open source can help to fulfill today’s business requirements with less cost and complexity. (More …)
The Open World Forum – now at its third edition – will take place in Paris on 30 September and 1 October 2010, bringing together open technology decision-makers from around the world. (More …)
Open source software procurement processes in the field of Italian public administrations will be at the center of the upcoming open source conference “Public tenders and open source“, next Thursday 17 June in Rome at the IBM eGov solution center (disclosureaimer: IBM Italy is a client and is the sponsor of the event). (More …)
Roberto Galoppini, 
Andrei, 
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