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European Commissioner Outlines Open Source Priorities

The Commissioner welcomed developments in open source throughout public administrations in Europe to seize the economic and innovative potential of open source. These include the Action Plan on Free Software and Digital Commons in France, the initiatives in Estonia, Spain and Italy, as well as the newly created Centre for Digital Sovereignty in Germany. According to the Commissioner, several factors are needed to use the potential of open source and to reach the political goals of the EU: nurturing a tech startup culture, utilising the digital single market for lean and sustainable tech industry, overcoming planned obsolescence, pooling the efforts of the EU’s Member States for technological independence and improving cybersecurity.

European Commission Launches Interoperable Europe, The New Policy Framework For Interoperability In The European Union

On November 21st, the European Commission announced the launch of Interoperable Europe, the initiative for a reinforced interoperability policy in the EU that replaces the ISA2 Program and is funded by the new Digital Europe Programme, a new funding program focused on digitalization for businesses, citizens and public administrations.Interoperable Europe represents the policy framework for pursuing, supporting, developing and promoting interoperability across the European Union. On the financial side, it is funded by the part of the Digital Europe Program dedicated to interoperability.

Forza open-source: Italian military to adopt LibreOffice

Jon Gold | Network World | September 15, 2015

The Document Foundation’s Italian subsidiary, LibreItalia, said Wednesday that the Italian Ministry of Defense has agreed to adopt LibreOffice, the open-source productivity suite, in October, and that it will create its own online training courses for the new software by the end of 2016. The move was prompted, in part, by an Italian law that mandates the consideration of open-source alternatives to proprietary software for government use, which was originally passed in June 2012. LibreItalia and the military’s IT staff will release the educational material to the public at large under the Creative Commons license.

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German eHealth Working Group Reasserts Focus on Interoperability

Interoperability of eHealth solutions is getting renewed attention from Germany’s health care organizations. Trouble exchanging information between medical systems is hindering eHealth reaching its full potential, says the Federal Ministry of Health. The ministry made interoperability a key topic at the eHealth working group meeting, part of an IT Summit in Hamburg in October. Read More »

Open Source To Be The Norm In German Public Procurement

On 8 December 2021 a coalition of SPD (Social Democratic Party, the Greens (Alliance 90 / The Greens) and Liberals (Free Democratic Party) took office after obtaining a majority in the 26 September federal elections. With the new government comes a renewed commitment to digitalisation of not only the public sector but society and economy at large...In the final coalition agreement open source software plays an important role. It is considered in a digital sovereignty and pan-European context, as a way to bring progress to digital infrastructure and government services. Interoperability, data portability, open standards and open source are all named as prerequisites to achieve digital sovereignty.

US Department Of Defense Publishes New Guidelines For The Internal Use Of Open Source For Cyber Defense Purposes

On January 24, 2022, John Sherman, the Chief Information Officer (CIO) of the US Department of Defense (DoD) released internally (and published two days later) a Memorandum for the Senior Pentagon Leadership, the Commandant of the Coast Guard, the Commanders of the Combatant Commands, the Defense Agency and the DoD Field Activity Directors. Particularly, it provides the Department of Defense with new guidelines on software development and open source software, addressing the opportunities and challenges that open source can represent for the public sector, and how the latter should interact in this regard.