freedom

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

Brussels, 15/5/2020 – Yesterday, in plenary, the European Parliament endorsed a number of budgetary discharge reports, which include Pirate amendmentsurging EU institutions to predominantly use Open Source solutions. This success happened despite the joint effort of the EPP and ECR Groups to strike out these essential parts of the reports. In practice, from now on, all IT solutionsdeveloped by and for the EU institutions willfirst needto beassessed against the possibility of using Open Source solutions. Assessments will then have to be reported back … Read more

Covid-19: Key takeaways for digital teams

Collaboration, code sharing and privacy — here are the key lessons from digital teams in rapid response mode This article is written by David Eaves, lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School, Tom Loosemore, Partner at Public Digital, with Tommaso Cariati, student at the Harvard Kennedy School and Stanford Graduate School of Business, and Blanka Soulava, … Read more

COVID-19 Hackathons: Only Free Software creates global solutions

Currently we see a lot of hackathons to find tools that help tackle the crisis of pandemic COVID-19. More and more governments and administrations are hosting or funding such hackathons. To make sure that the results of these hackathons can be used globally and adapted locally – that the software can be used, studied, shared … Read more

EUvsVirus Hackathon to develop innovative solutions

To complement hackathons taking place at global and member state level, the European Commission – in close collaboration with EU member states – will host a pan-European hackathon to connect civil society, innovators, partners and buyers across Europe to develop innovative solutions to coronavirus. The #EUvsVirus Hackathon will take place on 24, 25 and 26 … Read more

Tackling the Beast: Using GNU Health to help the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic

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 … Read more

The Open Source Policy Meeting 2020

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 … Read more

Collaboration between OpenProject and OpenPM²

The PM²Alliance and OpenProject are making cooperative project management accessible to everyone. Our partnership brings us even closer to our goal, which is to enable project teams to do better projects using effective, free and open source project management. Pursuing our vision to take the PM² “where no PM² has gone before”, with this collaboration … Read more

Why freeing Windows 7 opens doors

Since its launch on January 24th, we’ve had an overwhelming amount of support in our call to “upcycle” Windows 7. Truthfully, the signature count flew far faster than we ever expected it to, even despite our conservative (if aptly numbered) goal of 7,777 signatures. We have seen the campaign called quixotic and even “completely delusional,” … Read more