
European parliament strongly recommends open source software - ashitlerferad
https://european-pirateparty.eu/european-parliament-strongly-recommends-any-software-developed-by-and-for-the-eu-institutions-to-be-made-publicly-available-under-free-and-open-source-software-licence/
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elyseum
The intro of the text makes it look more like a cost cutting measurement.
Luckily the end states that “publicly financed software developed for the
public sector should be made publicly available under a Free and Open Source
Software licence. If it is public money, it should be public code as well.”

~~~
timkam
The same statement should apply to research papers; I am happy that the EU is
pushing for this as well, with considerable success.

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elcomet
In addition to open sourcing their own software, I hope governments and the EU
will pay developers and maintainers of open source software they use.

~~~
amelius
They should. I think that if there are grants for scientific research, there
should also be grants for open source projects.

Right now there is a complete framework for research grants (national
organizations and the European Research Council), but afaict no such thing
exists for open source projects. I think this should change.

Also, there should be structural government support for security
hardening/audits.

~~~
erk__
They have been giving out grants for Checking security of open source
software. I think that in the past projects such as Rust and curl have gotten
grants to make a review of the code.

~~~
amelius
Certainly, but how large was the budget?

Then compare it to the 10-100 billion euros spent annually on scientific
research [1].

I'm not saying that the budgets should be equal, but there should be _some_
proportionality.

I also think it should be easier for universities to have scientific
programmers (who would write open source software) on their payroll.

It's especially important for Europe as more research on open protocols means
that the internet can become less dependent on large US corporations. And for
this type of research you'd need developers.

[1]
[https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01566-z](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01566-z)

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jamieweb
Relevant: [https://publiccode.eu](https://publiccode.eu)

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xondono
The bigger problem from my experience is that there’s too much duplication of
efforts because of how grant money is distributed.

I think it would make a lot of sense to have some sort of voting system where
institutions could propose and vote OSS packages and make grants available
while making sure teams worked together.

The team I worked in had for some reason invested in creating a full-fledged
python interpreter that loaded CERNs ROOT framework and had that many finicky
dependencies that the team just shared an ubuntu image with everything
installed. And that was some auxiliary setup, we were building hardware
systems for precise timming until the team realized that another team _from
the same institution_ was working on a similar problem with 10x the budget.

~~~
jotm
You'd think it would be easy to track with a database of "Active projects"
with tags, easily searchable, and a point on the to-do list: "Check for the
existence of projects with similar functionality before starting a new one"

~~~
iguy
But the problem is wider than just not knowing what others are doing.

Grant money for writing things tends to encourage everyone to start their own
thing, because having something you own is a good story to tell, it makes you
look like a leader (at least in your reports) in a way that contributing bug-
fixes to someone else's project simply doesn't. (In commerce it's the other
way around, the guy with many clients can split the cost, and thus give more
functionality per dollar, and thus out-compete the little guys.)

GP's suggestion of giving end-uses some kind of tickets to distribute to
software they use, and then pay its developers, sounds like a smart way to
encourage consolidation.

~~~
xondono
The whole EU grant process it’s a giant mess. I’ve seen job postings for
developers where the most important required skill was knowing the grant
process and how to write successful proposals (which is an art form itself).

This has provided a specially perverse incentive for people that are involved
in both academia and politics.

I know of a certain emeritus professor that was particularly involved in
national politics (spain did not have that many engineers 60 years ago), his
engineering skills are average at best, since he has spent his whole life
working the politics of academia. That said, he had so many titles and awards
that just his qualifications earned the company he created a lot of points
towards getting substantial grants. The startup has been getting >1M€/year
since 2014 from the EU, plus indirect investment from private firms that can
claim special benefits. All money they get they “invest” into getting stuff
like patents, that allow them to claim IP with made up value.

They actually have a patent for a robot architecture for which there’s no
analytic solution to inverse kinematics, meaning that instead of having a
trigonometric formula for computing the position of the robot, we had to do an
exhaustive search simulating the position of the robot in 3d space until we
were close enough.

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CuriousSkeptic
If only this extended to open data as well.

I started developing what was to be an open source nutritional planning app
and found this project ([https://www.eurofir.org/](https://www.eurofir.org/))
which is apparently funded by heaps of my tax money.

I can’t tell you how frustrating it is to not be allowed to use that data for
public good.

------
lifeisstillgood
I am very glad to see this - I have been banging on about this
(unsuccessfully) for years - [http://oss4gov.org/](http://oss4gov.org/)

Good news, even if it is _only_ EU parliament.

Edit: one thing i do think will help adoption is credentialed support - so
it's pretty obvious I can always find some other company who knows Apache
httpd - but far less obvious if I want to use a mid-ranking piece of OSS and
if we are having to build our own OSS system (say something to manage building
planning permission).

But if there were consortiums of OSS ISPs who could cross certify on a given
piece of software it would get over one of the huge if not hugest problem -
who do I call if there is a problem and are they credible?

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sayusasugi
I recall several European nations switching government systems over to Linux
only to have Microsoft worm their way back in a few years later. Let's hope
it's permanent this time.

~~~
collyw
I think basically Linux didn't work that well for them more than "MS worming
their way back in". It sounded pretty pragmatic in the case of Munich from
what I read.

~~~
pabs3
Interestingly Munich are switching back to Linux again:

[https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-windows-why-
munich-i...](https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-windows-why-munich-is-
shifting-back-from-microsoft-to-open-source-again/)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23190447](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23190447)

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wrnr
I don't know, the only positive thing that can be said about some software is
that it is open source. In the past it has been more profitable to sell my
time at an insane hourly rate to keep a pile of crap running yet I struggle to
sell simple SaaS solution. Lack of product market fit on my part and I'll keep
working on it, but in the mean time I am not going to take this sanctimonious
talk about OSS by politician that are better paid then me and have a pension
plan to boot. We are all rent seeking but I don't hold my nose up to those
doing the hard work and try to shame them out of their hard earned money.

------
based2
[https://ec.europa.eu/info/departments/informatics/open-
sourc...](https://ec.europa.eu/info/departments/informatics/open-source-
software-strategy_en)

[https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/open-source-
observato...](https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/open-source-observatory-
osor)

------
whatever1
I am curious if the recommendation would had been the same if the EU had any
serious stake in the software development industry. I try to think of any
piece of software that I use daily that is not imported from the US, and I
struggle.

~~~
ken
The EU gave us Spotify, SoundCloud, Minecraft, and Angry Birds. There's plenty
of EU software companies you've heard of.

It's true that most brand name consumer software is from (companies
headquartered in) America right now, though all of the major companies also
have dozens of offices in Europe. (Chrome's V8 was famously written in
Denmark, before Google even had an office in that country.) Are you suggesting
this could be a response to American companies hiring people in EU countries,
but avoiding paying their share of corporate taxes there? That's possible, but
it doesn't sound to me like that's the reason.

I think it's at least as likely they're hedging against the different
countries in the EU each developing their own (incompatible) software and
playing against each other. In politics and business, America tends towards
"market will solve all", while the EU tends towards "there's dozens of us so
we need to cooperate to get anything done".

Maybe they looked at America and saw it as a cautionary tale. California has a
massively disproportionate power over everything related to computers today.
Europe has a bit of history with one member state trying to exert a
disproportionate power over the rest.

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mark_l_watson
Interesting that there is no mention of using Lunux or FreeBSD.

------
Proven
And they're experts in ... spending other people's money and telling others
what to do.

Members of the EU Parliament & Pirates have contributed close to 0 lines of
code to OSS. Thank you for your service!

~~~
gostsamo
Actually, the European Commission and the EP had a program under witch they
identified open source software used in the institutions and paid developers
maintaining them to fix bugs. Nodepad++ was one of the programs as far as I
know.

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wrnr
Don't get ur hope up, Wikipedia is the best side ever, but it is run on the
worst software ever, WikiMedia, I'd think that with the 100 million they get
in donation every year it would be better.

~~~
wrnr
Seriously they don't even have a WYSIWYG, I've build a WYSIWYG, and it was fun
and profitable. This is what u don't get, OpenOffice did not beat MsOffice, no
close sourced google cloud did, in the mean time they changed their name to
LibreOffice because of some tiresome disagreement.

------
TomMarius
I wonder how that plays together with their intent to firewall the European
internet, track it and otherwise mirror Chinese development. Seems like plain
PR to me.

[https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2020/6487...](https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2020/648784/IPOL_STU\(2020\)648784_EN.pdf)

~~~
tpush
> their intent

This study does not express the intent of the EU or the European Parliament,
but is the opinion of their authors, all working for the same company (Future
Candy).

~~~
TomMarius
This document is by the Policy department of the EP. That a company wrote it
does not mean that it's their opinion - somebody from the Policy department
requested and oversaw it, and then accepted it and published for their
managers (the von der Leyen administration itself) to use.

~~~
tpush
Fron the document itself:

"DISCLAIMER AND COPYRIGHT The opinions expressed in this document are the sole
responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official
position of the European Parliament."

