Nov
18: The conference "Open Standards and Libre Software in Government"
held in coordination with the Dutch Presidency of the European Union in The
Hague concluded successfully today. Keynote speakers on behalf of the Dutch
prime minister's Innovation Platform and the office of the Irish prime minister
urged governments to consider open source software in spirit of inter-agency
collaboration. The European Commission launched its definition of Open
Standards, and several representatives of EU ministries announced major national
open source and free software efforts.
Open
standards and Free/Libre/Open Source software is of critical importance to
governments across Europe, which was reflected by the keynote speakers. Frans
Nauta, Secretary of the Innovation Platform chaired by the Dutch Prime
Minister, emphasised the need for collaboration between governments and
citizens and lauded the open source movement as a model for open cooperation.
Colm Butler, director of information society policy for the department of the
Irish Prime Minister urged the open source community to make technical matters
easier to understand for decision-makers.
In
the session on interoperability and open standards, Barbara Held from the
European Commission's IDA (Interchange of Data between Administrations) Unit
announced their definition of Open Standards, which require the “intellectual
property - i.e. patents possibly present - of (parts of) the standard to be
made irrevocably available on a royalty-free basis”. It also calls for “no
constraints on the re-use of the standard” to be imposed. The definition is
part of the European Interoperability Framework just published at http://europa.eu.int/ida/en/document/3473
Among
other speakers, Christian Hardy from the French ministry of finance presented
the large migration of over 100 000 desktops to OpenOffice, the free software
alternative to Microsoft Office, across the national French Administration.
Rolf Theodor Schuster, CIO at the German Foreign Ministry presented a live
demonstration of the fully open source desktop and server system that secures
the global German embassy network.
Additionally,
the vice-mayor of The Hague, and representatives from government authorities in
Vienna, London, Haarlem and the Union of Italian Provinces described their open
source experiences and future plans.
The
event was organised by MERIT, University of Maastricht under the FLOSSPOLS
project supported by the 6th Framework IST / e-government Programme European
Commission, the Dutch Ministries of Economic Affairs and of the Interior, and
the Dutch Government's OSOSS Programme.
More
information and the conference programme is available at the conference website,
http://flosspols.org/conf/
Pictures taken during the conference. © Herman Pijpers, MERIT. Publication permitted.
Contact:
Rishab
Aiyer Ghosh, Project leader, FLOSSPOLS
MERIT,
University of Maastricht, PO Box 616, 6200MD Maastricht, Netherlands
Tel:
+31 6 29 07 44 87. Fax: +31 43 388 4905. e-mail: conf@flosspols.org