European Commission Approved New Rules with respect to public software, in accordance with which software solutions developed by the European Commission representing potential benefits for residents, companies and state-owned institutions will be available to everyone under open licenses. The rules also simplify the translation into the discharge of open already existing software products belonging to the European Commission, and reduce paper red tier-related paper process.
As examples of the decisions developed for the European Commission, it is noted Esignature – a set of do not require deductions standards, utilities and services for creating and verifying electronic signatures accepted in all countries of the European Union. Another example is the package Leos (Legislation Editing Open Software) designed to prepare templates Legal documents and legislative acts that can be edited in a structured format suitable for automatic processing in various information systems.
All open products of the European Commission plan to be placed in one repository to simplify access and borrow code. Before publishing source texts, security audit will be conducted, checks for the potential leakage of confidential data in the code and the possible intersections with someone else’s intellectual property are analyzed.
In contrast to the previously existing processes of opening the Code of the European Commission, new rules allow you to do without the approval of the opening of the code at a meeting of the European Commission, and also allow programmers working for the European Commission and participating in the development of any open projects, without additional coordination to transmit open improvement projects In the course of its main work. In addition, the software revisions developed before the adoption of new rules will be gradually, in order to assess the feasibility of its opening, if programs can be useful not only to the European Commission.
The announcement also mentions the results of the European Commission study of the impact of open software and hardware for technological independence, competitiveness and innovation in the EU economy. The study showed that the investment in the open on average allows you to get four times higher profits. The report provided it is argued that the Open software contributes to the European Union’s GDP from 65 to 95 billion euros. At the same time, it is predicted that an increase in the participation of the European Union in the development of an open code by 10% will lead to an increase in GDP 0.4-0.6%, which in absolute figures is approximately 100 billion euros.