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"gewg_" writes:

Member of the European Parliament Julia Reda blogs

Security and liberty don't have to be opposites. I want the European Union to focus its energy and funds on projects that increase both the safety and the autonomy of its people at the same time. At my proposal, next year's EU budget will include a step in that direction:
€1 million of the EU's €40 million pilot project fund will be spent towards open source software security.

The European Union's interoperability page says

The European Parliament is funding a security audit of the free and open source solutions used by the Parliament and the European Commission. Last Wednesday, the EP allocated €1 million for the audit project, to be carried out by the EC Directorate General for Informatics (DIGIT). The project should also come up with best practices for code review and quality assessments of free software and open standards funded by the EU.

canopic jug writes:

A French Free Software organization, April, has announced that a German Documentary from the ARD, "The Microsoft Cyber Attack" has been released in English thanks to Deutsche Welle (DW). It is an informative and objective film about the inappropriate relations between a certain infamous corporation and the various public administrations. The documentary first aired on February 19^th, 2018 by the German public broadcaster (ARD).

In May 2017, hundreds of thousands of computers running Microsoft Windows operating systems were disabled by the WannaCry cyber attack. How could a single malware program simultaneously cripple companies, hospitals and even government intelligence services all around the globe? Microsoft Windows software programs proved to be their common Achilles heel. Companies and private individuals use software from Microsoft. Government and public administrations from Helsinki to Lisbon run it, too. That makes all of them vulnerable to attacks from hackers and spies. Microsoft Window's dominance also undermines European procurement legislation, impedes technological progress and costs Europe a bundle. Journalist Harald Schumann and his team of Investigate Europe researchers have spoken with insiders and administrators from all across the continent. The German government's former IT director, Martin Schallbruch, tells us how countries are becoming increasingly dependent on Microsoft. A legal expert from the Netherlands describes how the European Commission and governments are breaking European laws regulating public tenders. Hamburg's data protection commissioner, Johannes Caspar, warns that Microsoft Windows systems expose individuals' private data to the prying eyes of US intelligence services. Internal documents show that Germany's Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) suspects this, too. The European Parliament and the German parliament have responded by repeatedly demanding that government IT systems be converted to open source software. Their source codes can be accessed freely and copied at will, which would enable European security services to use, alter and monitor them. Italy's army is going open source, as have police in France, Lithuania, and in the cities of Rome and Barcelona. Why do most governments resist the alternatives, or fall back into Microsoft's clutches, as Munich city authorities did. The EU's Commissioner for the Digital Single Market, Andrus Ansip, and other key players have the answers.

The video itself, « The Microsoft Cyber Attack », is available at Youtube and is about 43 minutes long.

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

While fastidiously avoiding use of the F-word [i.e. freedom], the European Commission has published a very long report on the impact of open source software and hardware on technological independence, competitiveness and innovation in the EU economy. Open hardware is also covered.

This study analyses the economic impact of Open Source Software (OSS) and Hardware (OSH) on the European economy. It was commissioned by the European Commission's DG CONNECT.

It is estimated that companies located in the EU invested around €1 billion in OSS in 2018, which resulted in an impact on the European economy of between €65 and €95 billion. The analysis estimates a cost-benefit ratio of above 1:4 and predicts that an increase of 10% of OSS contributions would annually generate an additional 0.4% to 0.6% GDP as well as more than 600 additional ICT start-ups in the EU. Case studies reveal that by procuring OSS instead of proprietary software, the public sector could reduce the total cost of ownership, avoid vendor lock-in and thus increase its digital autonomy. The study also contains an analysis of existing public policy actions in Europe and around the world.

Back in 2006, Rishab Aiyer Ghosh prepared a similar report for UNU-MERIT, Study on the effect on the development of the information society of European public bodies making their own software available as open source, in The Netherlands.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The EU's AI Act could have a chilling effect on open source efforts, experts warn:

The nonpartisan think tank Brookings this week published a piece decrying the bloc's regulation of open source AI, arguing it would create legal liability for general-purpose AI systems while simultaneously undermining their development. Under the EU's draft AI Act, open source developers would have to adhere to guidelines for risk management, data governance, technical documentation and transparency, as well as standards of accuracy and cybersecurity.

If a company were to deploy an open source AI system that led to some disastrous outcome, the author asserts, it's not inconceivable the company could attempt to deflect responsibility by suing the open source developers on which they built their product.

"This could further concentrate power over the future of AI in large technology companies and prevent research that is critical to the public's understanding of AI," Alex Engler, the analyst at Brookings who published the piece, wrote. "In the end, the [E.U.'s] attempt to regulate open-source could create a convoluted set of requirements that endangers open-source AI contributors, likely without improving use of general-purpose AI."

In 2021, the European Commission — the EU's politically independent executive arm — released the text of the AI Act, which aims to promote "trustworthy AI" deployment in the EU as they solicit input from industry ahead of a vote this fall, EU. institutions are seeking to make amendments to the regulations that attempt to balance innovation with accountability. But according to some experts, the AI Act as written would impose onerous requirements on open efforts to develop AI systems.

In a recent example, Stable Diffusion, an open source AI system that generates images from text prompts, was released with a license prohibiting certain types of content. But it quickly found an audience within communities that use such AI tools to create pornographic deepfakes of celebrities.

canopic jug writes:

At the beginning of last year, Manuel Hoffmann, Frank Nagle, and Yanuo Zhou published a working paper on the Value of Open Source Software [PDF] for comment and discussion only.

The value of a non-pecuniary (free) product is inherently difficult to assess. A pervasive example is open source software (OSS), a global public good that plays a vital role in the economy and is foundational for most technology we use today. However, it is difficult to measure the value of OSS due to its non-pecuniary nature and lack of centralized usage tracking. Therefore, OSS remains largely unaccounted for in economic measures. Although prior studies have estimated the supply-side costs to recreate this software, a lack of data has hampered estimating the much larger demand-side (usage) value created by OSS. Therefore, to understand the complete economic and social value of widely-used OSS, we leverage unique global data from two complementary sources capturing OSS usage by millions of global firms. We first estimate the supply-side value by calculating the cost to recreate the most widely used OSS once. We then calculate the demand-side value based on a replacement value for each firm that uses the software and would need to build it internally if OSS did not exist. We estimate the supply-side value of widely-used OSS is $4.15 billion, but that the demand-side value is much larger at $8.8 trillion. We find that firms would need to spend 3.5 times more on software than they currently do if OSS did not exist. The top six programming languages in our sample comprise 84% of the demand-side value of OSS. Further, 96% of the demand-side value is created by only 5% of OSS developers.

The working paper is especially interesting when considered in the context of similar, earlier works such as Ghosh et al in Study on the effect on the development of the information society of European public bodies making their own software available as open source [PDF] published by the European Commission back in 2007. One would think that both sides of the pond would be very interested in this valuable commons and work to not just protect it but cultivate it further, rather than work to saw the legs from under it by advancing software patents instead.

Previously:
(2025) Open Internet Stack: The EU Commission's Vague Plans for Open Source
(2023) The Four Freedoms and The One Obligation of Free Software
(2023) Opinion: FOSS Could be an Unintended Victim of EU Security Crusade
(2021) European Commission's Study on Open Source Software

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

A group of technology companies and lobbyists want the European Commission (EC) to take action to reduce the region's reliance on foreign-owned digital services and infrastructure.

In an open letter to EC President Ursula von der Leyen and Executive Vice-President for Tech Sovereignty Henna Virkkunen, the group of nearly 100 organizations proposed the creation of a sovereign infrastructure fund to invest in key technology and lessen dependence on US corporations.

The letter points to recent events, including the farcical Munich Security Conference, as a sign of "the stark geopolitical reality Europe is now facing," and says that building strategic autonomy in key sectors is now an urgent imperative for European countries.

Signatories include aerospace giant Airbus, France's Dassault Systèmes, European cloud operator OVHcloud, chip designer SiPearl, open source biz Nextcloud, and a host of others including organizations such as the European Startup Network.

OVHcloud said the group was calling "for a collective industrial policy strategy to strengthen Europe's competitiveness and strategic autonomy. We are convinced this is the premise of what we hope will be a larger movement of the entire ecosystem."

Proposals include the sovereign infrastructure fund, which would be able to support public investment, especially in capital-intensive sectors like semiconductors, with "significant additional commitment of funds allocated and/or underwritten" by the European Investment Bank (EIB) and national public funding bodies.

It also suggests there should be a formal requirement for the public sector to "buy European" and source their IT requirements from European-led and assembled solutions, while recognizing that these may involve complex supply chains with foreign components.