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European Commission Will Increase Use of Open Source Software

Posted by Soulskill on from the leading-by-example dept.

jrepin writes: The European Commission has updated its strategy for internal use of Open Source Software. The Commission, which is already using open source for many of its key ICT services and software solutions, will further increase the role of this type of software internally. The renewed strategy puts a special emphasis on procurement, contribution to open source software projects, and providing more of the software developed within the Commission as open source.

9 of 37 comments (clear)

  1. All good... by DamonHD · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ...but I wish it wasn't news!

    Rgds

    Damon

    --
    http://m.earth.org.uk/
  2. Software commodity by dimeglio · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Great to see they will also contribute to open source software. Software is no longer the arcane art it used to be. Almost anyone with some basic skills can contribute in some way. It's not all about coding.

    --
    Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the author.
    1. Re:Software commodity by gmack · · Score: 4, Insightful

      When you are the size of the EC, hiring a few developers to add any needed features becomes cheaper than the software licenses for the proprietary competition.

    2. Re:Software commodity by MPBoulton · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Hit the nail on the head!

      This also avoids the ridiculous situation we have in the UK where many government departments are wasting money paying MS to provide support for XP so that they can go on using their crappy-lowest-bidder-software-that-no-one-understands-how-to-update. Instead a few quality developers can do a better job of ensuring EC staff use modern, more secure systems.

  3. Alarming trend. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2

    As the quality and use of OSS increases, there will be less and less demand for commercial products. This could very well result in decreased demand and lower pay for software developers. More and more of them will contribute to OSS as resume padding, creating a negative feedback loop that makes the offshoring / H1B crisis we're currently involved in seem like a picnic. Any type of really disruptive technology on top of that - self coding apps, or OSS that allows even MBA's to create reasonably good quality apps, or businesses and governments to 'roll their own' with only 1 or 2 people - could collapse the market for coders. At this point I think skill in niche languages / industries is a safer bet than more general skills.

    1. Re:Alarming trend. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Do you know how many times I've been paid to integrate open source software solutions together? Your theory is flat out wrong.

    2. Re:Alarming trend. by Celarent+Darii · · Score: 2

      On the contrary, not all OSS software is immediately useful to the task at hand. Someone has to install it, maintain it, and eventually rewrite it or add to it in order that it fulfils government requirements.

      This is what you do in industry, it won't be much different. Perhaps there won't be any more cubical farms of coders (thank God), but there will be work for small teams all the time to add a feature or provide a patch.

      What is even better is that they will be government jobs, which are about as secure as you can get. If I could get a government job coding, I would be a very happy person.

  4. Re:an invitable drawback by Pi1grim · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This fortunately means that there will be a large political body interested in not allowing NSA to get their hooks into OSS.

  5. Mostly for servers, though. by MtViewGuy · · Score: 2

    And with good reason: Linux has enjoyed its biggest success in the server market, especially after IBM successfully ported Linux to run in IBM mainframes. Indeed, many of the most trafficked web sites around the run on servers that use Linux.