Let's start our second session on the, let's now focus even more on the European Commission
and its efforts on the direction of open source.
So we have two experts from the OSPO here to tell us a little bit what has been done.
And again, let's try to remember to look up the future.
Let's see how everything has been done, what we can learn from it.
And let's also try to bring up new ideas on how we can make this work.
So, all yours.
Thank you very much.
We also have stickers.
I think that's important.
Please pick them as you leave the room when you walk away thinking, oh, this is not going
where we wanted to go.
There's a flyer.
And outside you already saw we have a roll-up to make a bit of advertisement for the OSPO.
So Gai Selenius, I'm Dutch.
Sir Anjith Arora, I'm confused.
Indian originally, but have been in the UK for 40 years and Belgium with the last six.
And the two of us will try to do a stand-up comedy show that will tell you a little bit
and bring you up to speed on what happens in open sourcing and around the commission.
We've been here already for quite a few hours and you've heard a lot about the policy developments.
The OSPO was started three years ago to remove legal and organizational barriers so that the
commission could become faster at doing and sharing open source.
And what this first slide, our staircase diagram, should show you is that we've been
in open source forever.
He's right behind the camera now.
He's one of those who worked at the commission and kick-started what now is the Apache project.
That's before this timeline started.
And the commission has always used open source in the infrastructure right from the start.
And I spoke to the people who installed the first lamp stack saying, OK, so that's where
we kept notes on which server was doing what and what the passwords were and who was doing
things and so we could transfer it when we rotate it around the organization.
And pretty soon other DGs, because Srinjeet and I are talking from the Digit, the Directorate
General for Informatics that's doing like an internal service provider, pretty soon
other services, the ones who are doing policy or putting things in place, were calling Digit
saying, I need a server for, I have a pesticide database system, it ran on a lamp stack.
And so the second layer, the use thing, that really exploded quite fast.
And so in our data centers, I think the numbers are 60, 70 percent these days are Linux machines,
replacing other Unix types by the way.
And then around 2003, 2006, in our Directorate General people started realizing we need to
work at the member state because this stuff is reusable, it's going to save us pots and
pots of money.
And the interoperability program was started that led to the interoperable act.
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No matter how much I say this.
Your time is above.
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Anna.
I've been trying to observe this change in the Commission ever since 2007 when I started writing for the European Commission on the open source observatory.
And so I've seen it going on this path. And I helped the Commission ask if I could help revamp the open source strategy.
In the year 2000 and 20, we announced an open source strategy that came with 10 action plans.
They are in the strategy, the strategy is open, it's out there.
Except that we never gave the details that was far too much.
The shopping list was like this. And first being recursive, start yourself, set up an open source program office.
That was really quite easy. But the two big barriers we had was that the Commission had a big problem in making its software available as open source.
Because we had a red tape process that would take six months of just a project person chasing signatures to get permission to make the software available as open source.
In the room we have one of the IP specialists who helped us a great deal with removing this barrier.
We now have, the default is if you want to share your software, it is open source.
If you want to share this proprietary, you go into this paperwork process that will take you six months, which means no project will do this.
Because we don't have time. No development project has a project developer that can spend 10 minutes every Friday afternoon chasing signatures.
Now when the project team says this is a useful software solution, it shares its open source.
That came with code.jropa.tu because we needed a place to share our software repository, share our software.
And the other big thing is that we moved our internal teams to sharing software amongst themselves.
And finally when you created a project on your internal repository, it was closed to you and your team.
Which means that I as an external, not in that team, could not see what the code was.
I didn't have access, only saw the name and you could find with a bit of luck the project owner and you could ask for permission to see the code.
We've changed this default and we already see the rewards because teams are now starting to reuse each other's work.
Not so much literally the code, but they're starting to build on each other's preparations.
Open sourcing, I managed it. I talked about it already. We have 400 projects, 2000 users. It's growing.
You're all welcome at code.jropa.tu. It's GitLab based. You need to log in, but that's just my small step.
The legal barrier was removed. I talked about that. We have labs, an important way to onboard new open source tools to our users.
So people from other services can come to us and say, can you, you know, we would like to experiment with HedgeDoc for example.
Well, now we can do that. Here are the ones we're currently running. Ythsi, OpenTalk, HedgeDoc, CripPad, Discourse.
And we're always looking for others. Outreach is what we're doing here and in other places.
We successfully integrated open source in our IT governance projects, which means that when a new project is proposed,
we are asking questions about open source. So we are forcing projects to from the start compare and look on the market to see if there's an open source alternative for their proprietary product.
And if they are willing to share whatever they're doing as code. And I will hand over to Srinjeet for the important pilot and preparatory action. Thank you.
So I joined, as I said, six years ago on this project, EU FOSSA 2. So we have this cycle. We may start some initiative.
The European Parliament gives us some money and we start what's called a pilot project. If that's successful, we move on to what's called a preparatory action project.
So hence the number two after the initiative. And in the EU FOSSA 2 initiative, we actually created an inventory of our open source.
We didn't have one. Not ashamed of that because I don't think many organizations have one even today. And it's a fast moving, changing scenario.
And then from that software inventory, we were able to identify which was our most important software. And then we decided to run back bounties and hackathons to improve the security.
So a lot of things were done under EU FOSSA, many for the first time like back bounties and hackathons. And then we thought, why are we not doing this on a European scale?
Really, we need to cooperate on open source and bridge these islands that exist. And actually it's the right time because open source has matured to a very high degree in many member states.
So it makes sense to cooperate and on a number of areas. So basically in terms of specific initiatives, so FOSSA is about FOSSA for European Public Services.
And it's about cooperation. Now breaking that down into specific work packages, one of them is to create a catalog of solutions.
So the French government, the Italian government, all member states have built wonderful open source systems, solutions. Why are we not reusing them?
Often we are not reusing them in our own countries, let alone across Europe. So giving visibility to solutions built by and for public administrations is a wonderful idea.
And we've had great successes in national catalogs and regional catalogs, saving lots of money, time and increasing interoperability.
So FOSSA is going to, we already have an MVP and we're going to expand it to many more member states. And hopefully we'll have a rich catalog which will save time and money.
Can I steal back? Yeah, please. Yeah, because we're being flagged also for going over time in our own session. I just wanted to round off with one thing.
Is that we are trying to prove that we can reuse software. So the catalog system is actually thanks to the Italian government team digitalicus.
We're starting to reuse their tool and the standard public auto jamal is also developed by them and others. And this is also something we're implementing.
And there's the author. There we go. So thanks for that. And I think you should deserve the credit for this.
And we are now in the process of launching our internal efforts to revamp the strategy once more. Because the staircase diagram, the first one, those were the internal strategies.
The last one, the most recent one was an external communicated internal strategy. And we're going into this process again.
And so the next round here is where we would like to discuss with you, whether we would like to have ideas from you, we would like to know what else can we do as an Ospo.
And I think the whole day so far has given us a lot of stuff to work with. But that's what we'll do in the next session.