Europe does not suffer from a lack of open source. It suffers from a lack of large-scale adoption. Across the European Union, the policy direction is already clear. Interoperability, reuse and cross-border public service improvement are now central to Europe’s digital agenda. Open source has also been increasingly linked to reduced dependency, stronger digital autonomy […]
A policy case for Greek as a national and European language data infrastructure Large language models depend on vast amounts of text, but scale without legal clarity produces fragile systems. Datasets built on opaque web crawling cannot guarantee lawful reuse, redistribution, or long-term sustainability. The German Commons provides a clear alternative: 154.56 billion tokens of […]
We would like to invite you to “Why and How to Switch from Oracle to PostgreSQL” webinar. If you’re considering a migration, this is your opportunity to get a strategic roadmap that helps you reduce Oracle costs and unlock the full potential of Postgres. In this session, you’ll learn how to: Presenters:Mostafa Zakaria, Sales Engineer […]
Open Data Day is an annual celebration of open data all over the world.
Fraunhofer ISI and OpenForum Europe are conducting a study for the European Commission which shall investigate in detail the economic impact of Open Source Software (OSS) and Open Source Hardware (OSH) on the European economy. The study should identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and challenges of open source in relevant ICT policies. The Open Source impact […]
Apologists for proprietary software like to say, “free software is a nice dream, but we all know that only the proprietary system can produce reliable products. A bunch of hackers just can’t do this.” Empirical evidence disagrees, however; scientific tests, described below, have found GNU software to be more reliable than comparable proprietary software. This […]
Government decisions about how public money is raised, allocated and spent are moral choices – reflecting a nation’s values and priorities. A nation’s budget determines what services are available and to whom – including schools for children, medicine for the sick and support for the unemployed. To assure that public budgets, and the use of […]
Introduction The world is facing one of the the biggest health, economic and social crisis. A minuscule, 50-nanometer in diameter structure is putting the most powerful world economies on their knees, and hundred of thousands are tragically succumbing to COVID-19. This article is an invitation to governments to embrace GNU Health and Libre Software for […]
This year’s pre-FOSDEM EU policy meeting on 31 January 2020 was a water-shed moment for OpenForum Europe. It’s an annual affair, but this year, we almost tripled the number of attendees who gathered to exchange ideas on the role of Open Source in accelerating Europe’s digital transformation. Representatives ranged from individual developers, SMEs and policy […]
The open source software country intelligence aims to provide insights on all EU Member States in the domain of open source software policies and initiatives. The country intelligence reports and their respective factsheets are published as part of the Open Source Observatory (OSOR) project of the ISA² Programme. The country intelligence will be presented in two formats: a […]