Organization and support

1.

Services for organization of information related to open source. The European Commission would provide resources and mechanisms to collect and organize open source software, and efforts related to its promotion and development. This would be very useful, since currently there is no central point of aggregation for both general interest software, special interest software, and documentation for open source projects. The European Commission could use its connections to the academic and research world, through research projects, to help in building such services.

2.

Funding of open source projects, including the provision of general facilities for open source development. The current efforts at funding open source projects, already present in the Workprogramme 2000 of the Information Society Technologies programme (IST), could be extended to other programmes. In addition, some form of alternative, low budget scheme should be found to allow for very small projects to get funded quickly without the need of the complete formal approval scheme of the IST submission. Appropriate rules for accountability should be sought to ensure the proper use of public money. A possible implementation could be the creation of schemas similar to those of sourceXchange or cosource, where users can propose possible projects. Among other areas, this funding should promote the the development of the missing software elements that can be considered fundamental, facilitate the celebration of developer meetings and in general promote the collaboration between European developers involved in open source software projects. A study on how free software development can be supported, and how funding and support mechanisms interact with free software models can be found in [20]

3.

Promotion of projects related to documentation, translation and localization of free software. These projects are of paramount importance for the widespread adoption of open source solutions by the public in general, and the small and medium companies in particular.