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The European Open Source Observatory and Repository (OSOR)

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I attended the Open Nordic Conference in Norway in June, a conference that brought together people from Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark. Attending the conference allowed me to find out what's going on with FOSS in Northern Europe. What I found interesting is that there was a lot of talk about using FOSS in the public sector. A number of countries are working on repositories to exchange software, in particular for public administration.

One example is the Software Exchange (softwareborsen.dk), a project by the Danish National Software Knowledge Centre to promote the use of FOSS in Danish public administration. The Norwegian software exchange (delingsbazaren.no) plays a similar role in Norway.

OSI and License Proliferation

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License proliferation has been a topic for discussion for quite a while now in the FOSS community and many would like to see the Open Source Initiative (OSI) fix this problem for good. In a license proliferation report, the OSI lists three problems that people generally see with license proliferation:

FLOSSInclude wants to foster FOSS in developing countries

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The EU is sponsoring a new two year project called FLOSSInclude to explore the use of FOSS as a development tool. In particular, the aim of FLOSSInclude is to study what is needed to "increase the deployment, development and societal impact of FOSS in Africa, Asia and Latin America". The project starts with the premise that FOSS provides a number of benefits to developing countries, such as low cost, adaptability, and a free-of-charge high quality training environment.

Obstacles for making FOSS development truly global

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Li Yang, who works for Freescale Semiconductor, gave a very interesting talk at linux.conf.au a few weeks ago about the obstacles of getting people from all around the world involved in FOSS projects. He started off by saying that he'd like FOSS to be really global, and not just global in the sense that developers from North America, Europe and Australia are involved.

Models and tools for FOSS quality

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There has been interest in quality models for FOSS for a long time. There are various concerns about FOSS and the quality thereof. Given that a lot of FOSS is produced by volunteers, how can we rely on the software? Is software developed in the public more secure, or can people use the source code to find exploits?