Rome – The Directorate General for Informatics (DIGIT) European Commission has released its new strategic plan to increase the use of open source solutions in the Community, a plan that covers a period of four years (2014-2017) and which also provides for the active participation of the EU to the FOSS community.
The updated strategy for DIGIT provides, among other things, that the Commission will have to use software that supports specific formats and well documented and preferably open, and will have standard services already widely used to improve interoperability (a key factor for the EU, is explained).
The software open will be the preferred choice (where possible) for internal development new computer systems, says DIGIT, and the FOSS solutions will have to be treated at the same level during the selection of the software to be acquired to operate the Community machine.
Following the principles of the new strategy of DIGIT, the EU will have to be transformed definitively from passive user of FOSS software to contributor active project to open used in Brussels; a greater number of software used by the EU will then be distributed under open license.
The strategic plan DIGIT was very much welcomed by OpenForum Europe, while the European division of the Free Software Foundation proves more timid and talks of a simple statement of intent rather than a Copernican revolution in key open.
What is certain is the growing approval of standards and software FOSS by the institutions, so that the associations go further than ever in there with the proposals – asking the EU to abandon the PDF format in favor of HTML5 and XForms – and software giants like Microsoft are forced to adopt ODF 1.2 (on suite to Office 365 subscription) in order to continue doing business with the government British.
The acceleration on the use of FOSS is certainly not just a European phenomenon, as in India, the authorities have decided to adopt exclusively open source software in application development, software and government services.
Alfonso Maruccia
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