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EU-Funded EDOS To Simplify Open Source Development
An anonymous reader writes "a consortium of European research institutions and open source software companies have paired up to manage the complexity of large scale, modular projects by establishing a program called EDOS, Environment for the Development and Distribution of Free Software. Planners intend to move away from centralized builds and storage to a distributed process, form a language-agnostic bug testing system and turn to theoretical computer science to safeguard dependencies."
I don't believe they really wintend to
All they'll end up with is EDOS Linux, yet another distibution with it's own cultish following. We already have organisation. Debian. 3.4 million euros for the open source community will be nice though, it may pay some of the court costs for patent claims.
I'm guessing that's because the original acronym is in French. It's Environnement pour le Développement et la distribution de logiciels Open Source, which makes a lot more sense.
Roberto Di Cosmo of University of Paris 7 claims that theoretical computer science is particularly strong in France and that its formal methods can be used to manage complex dependencies to create an "integrated, coherent whole."
In different words, people in France are jumping onto the open source bandwagon in order to squeeze out another few years of funding for the same old stuff they have already been doing for 30 years.
If you want to read more about formal methods, look here and here. You can judge for yourself how much relevance you think this is going to have for FOSS. I think its chances are close to nil.