Technical issues

1.

Promotion of open source reference implementations for any protocol standard. For new protocols and protocol standards, the creation and maintenance of a reference implementation distributed under an open source licence should be encouraged. This would make it possible to have at least one implementation available for public use, and to serve as a vendor-neutral reference for any other implementor. In addition, this could mitigate the problem of proprietary implementations adding non-standard features to standard protocols, harming interoperability. These issues are discussed with some detail in subsection 7.1.

2.

Endorsement of neutral data formats and open source tools for managing them. To facilitate interchange of documents, it should be encouraged the adoption by government and public entities of open and public data formats. The creation and use of open source tools for document parsing and transformation would ensure that the public have available, at a small cost, at least those tools to manipulate and work with such documents.

3.

Promotion of projects to improve quality of free software. Particular attention should be given to projects that try to maximize the quality of open source software, and its suitability for the user community. In this sense, the creation of regression test suites for fundamental software components, and test systems to evaluate the suitability to specific tasks should be designed and funded. In general, contributing regression test suites to open source systems is a very valuable task, and for testing the quality of software those regression tests are needed anyway.

4.

Promotion of free software in precompetitive research projects financed with public money When the European Union and member states finance research projects with public money, the delivery of open source products as a result of those projects would ensure that the outcomes are available to the community. It would also help to translate that research into marketable products, be it by the entities participating in the research project, or by third parties.