pterjan's diary

  European Union and Free Software

I was sorting some paper today and found some that I got during Open World Forum last December.

One is from European Open Source Observatory Repository. One of the interesting things it mentions is EUPL. I had never heard of this Free Software license (with copyleft). I'm not in favor of creating yet another license but this one has something that other don't have. It was first approved by the European Commission 2 years ago in English, French and German. Then last year it was validated in all the other official languages. So there is a license officially provided in 22 languages and officially validated to be compatible with European Union's law and with each European country's law.

Another paper was a presentation of some of the European funded research projects about open source software. I knew several of them as Mandriva is part of 5 of the 12 listed, but was surprised to find out that PyPy was an European funded project (from 2004 to 2007). So, sometimes European research project create software that is at the same time working and useful for a lot of people!

Update: As someone here pointed out, yes some other European projects achieve concrete results, like Nepomuk which was strongly integrated into KDE4, or EDOS which watches debian quality. The case of PyPy was different for me because I heard of it few years ago as something working very well and used by several people I know.