The European Commission is setting a new milestone in its digital transformation. On Wednesday, 21 October, the Commission published its internal strategy on open source software for the period 2020-2023, together with a detailed action plan.
“This strategy confirms the Commission's willingness to play an active role in this community”, commented Budget and Administration Commissioner Johannes Hahn. “We want to be a dynamic contributor to innovative and secure digital solutions that can be shared and reused to help promote digital public administration and services across the EU”, he added. This exercise is in line with the 2014-2017 strategy.
In this document, the Commission stresses the various advantages of open source software: the code is public, can be freely reused and is adapted and improved collaboratively; it can be inspected for security problems, is vendor-independent and favours interoperable systems.
Therefore, the Commission is committed to increasing its use of open source software and the sharing of software, data and information in practical areas of information technology, as well as in other policy areas, and to developing an inclusive public service.
The strategy also recognises the importance of cooperation between Commission services, with Member States, industry and the public for new and innovative digital solutions that work across borders and support technological sovereignty.
In terms of concrete actions, the strategy identifies, inter alia, the following: setting up the Open Source Programme Office, setting and promoting the “inner source” (the use of best practice in open source software development) default, enhancing the software repository, integrating open source code into internal IT governance.
See the strategy: https://bit.ly/3odvcw2 (Original version in French by Sophie Petitjean)