European Commission Will Increase Use of Open Source Software 37
jrepin writes: The European Commission has updated its strategy for internal use of Open Source Software. The Commission, which is already using open source for many of its key ICT services and software solutions, will further increase the role of this type of software internally. The renewed strategy puts a special emphasis on procurement, contribution to open source software projects, and providing more of the software developed within the Commission as open source.
All good... (Score:5, Insightful)
...but I wish it wasn't news!
Rgds
Damon
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Nobody wanted to get off the 'support contract' gravy train.
Software commodity (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Software commodity (Score:5, Insightful)
When you are the size of the EC, hiring a few developers to add any needed features becomes cheaper than the software licenses for the proprietary competition.
Re:Software commodity (Score:5, Insightful)
Hit the nail on the head!
This also avoids the ridiculous situation we have in the UK where many government departments are wasting money paying MS to provide support for XP so that they can go on using their crappy-lowest-bidder-software-that-no-one-understands-how-to-update. Instead a few quality developers can do a better job of ensuring EC staff use modern, more secure systems.
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They aren't saying what you think (Score:1)
I work for a company that works on research projects funded by DG connect. We don't do any actual work, we do "calls for tender". Basically, we dream up stuff that contains some recent IT buzzwords and throw it at the commission. If they express interest, we slap together a consortium of development companies that specialize in delivering these"research projects". The consortium always has to be predominantly southern European (preferably Greek) plus one German company (preferably Fraunhofer) to do the actu
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"They mean that the tool has to be publically available... Ie, if you build a web service, you have to make it available as an "open source" of data instead of charging for access... But only for the duration of the project (usually around 3 years). You can release your code in any way you like, or not at all. The commission doesn't care.
When they say they are going to invest in open source, this is what they mean."
Citation needed.
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Or you could submit the changes and have them merged into the project.
Alarming trend. (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Do you know how many times I've been paid to integrate open source software solutions together? Your theory is flat out wrong.
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On the contrary, not all OSS software is immediately useful to the task at hand. Someone has to install it, maintain it, and eventually rewrite it or add to it in order that it fulfils government requirements.
This is what you do in industry, it won't be much different. Perhaps there won't be any more cubical farms of coders (thank God), but there will be work for small teams all the time to add a feature or provide a patch.
What is even better is that they will be government jobs, which are about as secure a
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I don't believe I have ever read a more idiotic analysis on the use of OSS software or the market dynamics involved with software development in general. First off OSS projects may become more common but the vast majority of the existing projects are just as, if not, vastly more buggy, riddled with half baked functionality, and insecure than anything you will find in the commercial market. OSS growth will only increase the demand for developers not reduce it. Businesses and governments already "roll their
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Brilliant summary of European history from 800 to present day, all in one sentence!
Re:an invitable drawback (Score:4, Insightful)
This fortunately means that there will be a large political body interested in not allowing NSA to get their hooks into OSS.
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Holy Shit! No one in the FOSS community has ever thought about this before!!! There are not 500 articles describing exactly this and the variety of reasons why this is not NOT theoretically but NOT realistically possible! [/s]
https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/felten/the-linux-backdoor-attempt-of-2003/
Seriously, keep your fear-mongering to yourself. Especially if it's unfounded.
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"Then we need much better auditing, because the open source development process means that any random dude can offer patches."
OMG!
Quick, stop the presses!
As if a random dude offering a patch and a team accepting a patch were the same thing.
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Mostly for servers, though. (Score:3)
And with good reason: Linux has enjoyed its biggest success in the server market, especially after IBM successfully ported Linux to run in IBM mainframes. Indeed, many of the most trafficked web sites around the run on servers that use Linux.
Good (Score:2)