Boosting innovation and growth by fostering Open Source Software

Since the turn of the new millennium, Open Source has started to fundamentally shift the boundaries in Information and Communications Technology (ICT). By redefining the whole software design and value chain, it has already created a framework of solutions worth some €12 billion, and doubling every 18 months, as well as contributing to reshaping how ICT players create and use software for the decades to come.

However, some barriers still remain that prevent OSS from unleashing its full potential yet. All too often, organizations are reluctant to start using OSS. Their concern is simple: how can they trust software that is developed by a community, compared with the closed software products sold by traditional vendors? Do OSS vendors and communities have sustainable business models? Are there interoperability issues? What is the quality assurance process? The first internal consortium focused on Open Source Quality – the QualiPSo consortium – has been founded to help remove these final obstacles to the mainstream adoption of OSS.

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GOALS

Founded by a heavyweight group of ICT players, across three continents, QualiPSo brings together large IT integrators, industry groups, telecoms players, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), academics and government organizations from Europe, Brazil and China. It is also the largest ever Open Source initiative funded by the European Commission, as part of its Information Society Technologies (IST) initiative.

The QualiPSo consortium is carrying out research and development in seven key areas:

• Defining business models to facilitate the use of OSS in the industry

• Simplifying OSS legal environments

• Streamlining global interoperability of OSS solutions

• Implementing best practices in OSS information management

• Defining trustworthy quality processes for OSS

• Building next-generation software forges for OSS: the “QualiPSo Factory”

• Setting up OSS International Competence Centers

The first competence centers, delivering the technologies, process and policies resulting from QualiPSo’s research, will start to be established at the end of 2008.

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FRAUNHOFER_FOKUS in QualiPSo

FOKUS is leading the QualiPSo interoperability activity. In an environment that is characterised by a high diversity of software and actors, interoperability becomes a critical success factor. QualiPSo encourages OSS interoperability across technical, semantic and organisational borders. The project will identifies interoperability criteria and develops test beds, scenarios, integration components and guide lines which support interoperability of OSS components as well as between open and closed source software.

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CONSORTIUM

The QualiPSo consortium has been founded by a heavyweight group of

• ICT industry players (Atos Origin, Bull, Engineering Ingegneria Informatica, European Dynamics, Siemens, Telefonica I+D, Thales),

• SMEs (Centro Ricerche Matematica Pura e Applicata, Mandriva),

• governments (the Department for innovation and technologies of the Italian Presidency of the Council of ministers, the French Gendarmerie Nationale, Serpro), and

• academics (Fraunhofer FOKUS, INRIA, the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center, the State University of Sao Paulo, the South China University of Technology, the Free University of Bolzano, the University of Insubria and the University Rey Juan Carlos).

The project is partly funded by the European Commission under its sixth framework program (FP6), as part of the Information Society Technologies (IST) initiative. QualiPSo has been established to operate in synergy with European technology initiatives such as NESSI and Artemis. The project also leverages large OSS communities such as OW2, Morfeo and BerliOS.