Open source to sweep across Europe
European Parliament moves to strongly recommended all software development to be FOSS first.
“FROM NOW ON ,THE OPEN SOURCE ECOSYSTEM HAS A STEPPING GROUND FOR OFFERING OPEN SOURCE SOLUTIONS”
On 14 May the European Parliament moved to endorse a number of budgetary reports. This included strongly recommending that all software developed either for or by EU institutions should be released under a free and open source licence. This effectively means all IT solutions for EU bodies will first need to be assessed against using open source solutions and the results reported back to the Budgetary Control Committee of the Parliament on a yearly basis.
Last issue, we reported how the Dutch Parliament has passed a law that software for government is required to be open source first and even the Munich City coalition has passed to push again for open source software use. This latest development would see all software created for the EU Parliament having to be open source unless a strong reason for being closed source can be demonstrated.
Despite the opposition of certain right-wing parties, the budgetary reports were pushed through with the backing of the European Pirate Party. “From now on, the open source ecosystem has a stepping ground for offering open source solutions and the Pirates will gladly play the role of the guardians and will try to solve and highlight any attempt to bypass this strong recommendation. It’s a really important step to remove vendor lock-ins in the Parliament,” says Pirate vice-president of European Parliament Marcel Kolaja. More at https://bit.ly/lxf265eu.
This demonstrates how the efforts of lobbyists influence government policies, and coincides with this issue’s interview with Amanda Brock and her role at Openuk. The organisation aims to gather support within the UK government for greater open source development.
The Covid-19 pandemic highlights how important it is for governments to reliably call upon the cooperation of its citizens in tracking and eliminating virus threats with advanced tracking software. While making such software open source enables validation and analysis of the privacy issues of an app, it can’t stop governments from developing less-than-ideal solutions and then legislating for them to be used.
The UK’S Covid-19 app is set to store data centrally, with a remit to retain all data with no option for users to opt out. So even though the software is MIT licenced its implementation is far from ideal. You can find a basic analysis at Privacy International (https://bit.ly/lxf265app) 1. The charity has also taken an in-depth look at the difficulties of tracking entire populations of humans: see https://bit.ly/lxf265covid 2.