The European Union Embraces Open Source: Open Source Matters

Welcome to the 6th edition of Open Source Matters: our regular publication about the latest happenings in open source! Let’s dive into the news.

European Union Studies the Impact of Open Source Software and Hardware

The European Commission released an extensive study that evaluates the impact of open source technology on EU technology independence, innovation, and competitiveness. The study provides nearly 400 pages of detailed analysis and recommendations related to business models, economic impacts, and public policy. Here are a few of the study’s more notable conclusions:

• Open source measurably improves productivity and competitiveness; for every €1 invested in open source, organizations should expect €4 in return.
• EU-based open source developers are more likely to work for small companies. This contrasts with the large company bias of U.S.-based developers.
• Open source contributions improved EU GDP by €50 to €65 billion in 2018 and the total economic impact is estimated to be between €65 and €90 billion per year.
• A 10% increase in open source contributions from the EU would generate an additional 600 IT startups per year and 0.4%–0.6% additional GDP growth.
• EU companies and governments have invested over €1 billion in open source, and approximately 8% of EU software developers — roughly 260,000 individuals — have contributed to open source.

Download the study to learn more.

France Publishes 9,000 Open Source Projects

In France, source code that is bought or developed by public agencies is considered to be administrative documents that fall under open data regulations. Le Gouvernement de la République française — i.e., the government of France — recently published more than 9,000 repositories of open source code from more than 1,000 organizations. Many of these organizations had previously published the code on their own, so this effort was initiated to make it easier to reuse and contribute to existing projects.

This project has been underway for nearly two years but has now officially reached its 1.0 launch with a new website to support it. In addition to providing information about all of the published repositories and organizations, the site also provides details about the dependencies the organizations rely on and the languages and licenses they use.

New Open Source Projects

• Open Rally Computer – A hardware device used in motorcycle rally racing that shows speed, distance traveled, and course heading.
• Driftwood – A security tool from Truffle Security that detects leaked public/private keypairs on the internet.
• Living of the Land Classifier – A security tool from Adobe that detects malicious system commands.
• Open Source Good Governance Handbook – A guide that teaches organizations how to implement professional management of open source software.
• Superalgos – An automated cryptocurrency trading bot.
• Karpenter – An auto-scaling platform for Kubernetes deployment from AWS.
• Kryptology – Secure libraries and APIs from Coinbase to leverage cryptographic functionality.