The EU Open Source Strategy is one of the measures of the Tech Sovereignty Package, published by the European Commission with the ambition to strengthen Europe’s digital autonomy and resilience. The Strategy recognises open source as a strategic enabler for European competitiveness, technological sovereignty, innovation and cybersecurity.
Among the first initiatives implementing the Strategy, the Commission is conceptualising a voluntary self assessment framework for open source projects, which will assess, among others, quality aspects from a European technological sovereignty perspective such as maturity, popularity, developer/maintenance activity, transparency of governance, licensing, quality of code and documentation, use of standards, and alignment to relevant EU policies. The framework is expected to support not only the Commission, which could better understand the landscape of available open source software and its suitability for achieving the objectives of the Strategy, but also: i) the open source projects themselves, which could get recognition and visibility in addition to obtaining a measure of their strengths and areas for improvement; and ii) the users (from both public and private sector) that could also increase their understanding of the offer and suitability of existing open source software.
The framework, which will be jointly developed by DG CNECT and the Joint Research Centre (JRC), is initially designed as a voluntary self-assessment tool. Its development will consider, and where possible rely on, other open source assessment frameworks already available, and will be co-created and validated with open source communities in Europe. In this regard, the talk will offer a first opportunity to present the idea behind the framework as well as to collect some initial feedback from the conference audience.