On 20 December last, the European Parliament announced its investment of €1 million in an audit of the free and open source solutions used by the Parliament and the Commission. This audit will be accompanied by a policy of applying best software practices and by the development of an AT4AM solution for creating amendments, to the tune of €500,000.
European institutions are known for having adopted a number of free and open source software source solutions, from the individual workstation level to administrative infrastructure. This inclination has gradually shifted such that they now make real contributions to the open source community. The first step in this process will therefore focus on improving software security through the performance of an audit. This means an analysis of the solutions used at the European Parliament and/or Commission. Their systematic analysis will be supplemented by the definition of good code quality and review practices. This is a large scale project worth €1 million, put forward by the Parliament to boost confidence in the solutions.
The inspiration for the Greens/European Free Alliance eco-movement to submit the project was expressed by EMPs Julia Reda and Max Andersson: “The vulnerability of critical information infrastructure has drawn the public’s attention to the need for an understanding of the governance and quality of the underlying software code and how this can affect their confidence in the applications”. The Free Software Foundation is enthusiastic about this project and has shared information about it in a recent letter from its president.
The European Commission’s Directorate-General for Informatics (DIGIT) is responsible for the project’s implementation. The first step will entail the production of a complete list of the solutions used by the institutions. One of the most remarkable aspects of the project will also be the publication of the results of this audit, which will be conducted in close collaboration with the developers community.
Another parliamentary announcement involved the allocation of €500,000 to DIGIT to develop the software application AT4AM. This open source web software was designed for the creation of amendments and is currently available in a Beta 0.1 version. Developed over the course of four years, the tool has enabled the editing and distribution of several thousands of amendments. Not all of the functionalities have been released to the community thus far, but we would wager that this budget bump may change that in the months to come.
Source: joinup.ec.europa.eu