14 DAY TRIAL // The European Commission is working to upgrade open source policy so that developers have a much easier time to contribute to upstream projects, by removing some of the current constraints.
Europe is a very diverse continent, but it seems that the European Commission is looking to make things a little bit better for all the developers by improving the current open source policy. The end result should be a much smoother process for developers and less needed bureaucracy, which in turn should result in much bigger participation in open source projects.
It's still unclear how the measures taken by the European Commission will be translated into practice, and like any governing body, it will probably take a long time to decide what and how exactly they need to implement.
In any case, it shows that people are finally realizing the importance of open source and the fact that it can provide a powerful alternative to commercial solutions, which have dominated the market landscape for many years.
This is about policy for EC’s software developers and functionaries
It's not like the European Commission is talking about changing licenses or anything like that. This is more about a more open approach from the governmental apparel towards other solutions. In fact, the documentation proposed to the EC talks about equal rights for proprietary and open source software when it comes to deciding the optimal software for any given project.
"The European Commission wants to make it easier for its software developers to submit patches and add new functionalities to open source projects. Contributing to open source communities will be made central to the EC’s new open source policy, expects Pierre Damas, Head of Sector at the Directorate General for IT (DIGIT). Damas and his colleagues aim to remove barriers that hinder code contributions to open source software, he announced yesterday at a conference in Brussels."
"The Commission wants to clarify legal aspects, including intellectual property rights, copyright and which author or authors to name when submitting code to the upstream repositories. He anticipates that reinvigorating the policy will motivate many of the EC’s software developers and functionaries to promote the use of free and open source software at the EC," is noted on the joinup.ec.europa.eu website.
Interestingly enough, the European Commision is already relying quite a lot on open source solutions, like Apache servers, Linux operating systems, and Drupal, just to name a few. If things go according to plan, we'll get to see a lot more OSS (open source software) used by Europe's center of power in Brussels.
