The FOSSEPS (Free and Open Source Software for European Public Services) Preparatory Action, established under the 2024 Union budget, has now reached a significant milestone. Building on the foundations laid by the FOSSEPS Pilot Project, the Preparatory Action has delivered concrete results across all its key areas of work, advancing the Union's goals of digital sovereignty, software reuse, and the sustainable adoption of open source software in European public administrations.
An open source catalogue at European scale
One of the most tangible outcomes of the Preparatory Action has been the transition of the EU Open Source Solutions Catalogue from its initial minimum viable product (MVP) phase to full production. What began as a proof of concept has grown into a fully operational platform serving public administrations across the Union.
The numbers reflect this growth. The Catalogue now lists more than 1,000 open source solutions (libraries, modules, infrastructure software), sourced from 12 national and regional catalogues across Europe, alongside third-party independent open source projects. New features and usability improvements have been introduced throughout, making it easier for public administrations to find, evaluate and reuse software, which is precisely what the Catalogue was designed to do.
The Preparatory Action has also advanced the governance of the publiccode.yml metadata standard, which allows software published by public administrations to be described in a machine-readable format and federated across catalogues. Improving the governance of this standard is not the most visible of achievements, but it is an important one: without robust and commonly agreed metadata, the ambition of a truly federated European open source catalogue cannot be realised.
To facilitate the uptake of the EU OSS catalogue, a new report was published setting out practical strategies to overcome the barriers that still limit the sharing and reuse of open source software across the public sector. Its goal is to help public administrations turn open source potential into practical, scalable reuse. Additionally, an online course based on the report will soon be published to complement the existing courses covering related topics on publiccode.yml and the EU OSS Catalogue. These are available on the Interoperable Europe Academy, alongside several other courses on open source for public administrations (check out Curriculum category 09 - Openness).
Understanding What We Depend On
A comprehensive study on critical open source software within European Public Services has been successfully completed under the Preparatory Action. Extending the inventory work begun during the Pilot Project, the study offers public administrations and policymakers a clearer picture of the software components that underpin essential services across the Union. Its findings are intended to guide future collaborative efforts on cybersecurity risk identification and mitigation, carried out in close cooperation with industry and open source community partners.
Investing in Security: Bug Bounty Programmes
Going beyond analysis, the FOSSEPS Preparatory Action launched bug bounty programmes for a number of widely used open source projects across European public services, incentivising the responsible discovery and resolution of security vulnerabilities in software that European public administrations rely on every day.
The following projects were included:
- OpenProject: project management software
- Nextcloud: file sharing and collaboration platform
- BigBlueButton: video conferencing solution
- Keycloak: identity and access management
- BIND: domain name system server software
- Jenkins: continuous integration and delivery platform
- FFmpeg: multimedia processing framework
- ImageMagick: image processing library
By sponsoring security research in these projects, the Union contributes not only to the resilience of its own digital infrastructure, but also to the broader open source ecosystem from which European public services benefit.
Looking Ahead
Taken together, the achievements of the FOSSEPS Preparatory Action demonstrate that targeted, well-scoped investment in open source software can yield real and lasting results. A production-ready catalogue strengthened metadata governance, a clearer picture of critical software dependencies, and improved security across key open source tools, these are outcomes that public administrations across Europe can build on.
Further information on the FOSSEPS initiative, including all associated publications and resources, is available on the Interoperable Europe Portal .