The European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (EU-OSHA) says its use of open source software is a logical consequence of being a publicly funded organisation. "Open source should be relevant for all public administrations."
The organisation based in Bilbao, Spain, aims to make European workplaces safer, healthier and more productive. It makes workers and employees aware of work-related risks and of how to manage them.
Public funds should be used as much as possible to invest in public, transparent and open source software, says Gorka Moral, the organisation's webmaster.
"We manage public money, so we should try to avoid locking ourselves in to proprietary technology. Besides, using open source increases competition, as anyone can access and study the code."
Content
That is why EU-OSHA decided to use the open source content management system Plone and the Zope application server to build a content management system (CMS), which it called Osha3.
It is intended to manage and facilitate the work of a network of partners and external editors, geographically located all around Europe and beyond, EU-OSHA explain on its website.
EU-OSHA made available the source code for Osha3 in May, publishing it under the GPLv2 Licence. "We resolved to make this code available at the same moment we decided to use Plone and Zope."
The organisation has also considered using the European Union Public Licence (EUPL). However, at the time the content management system was ready, the EUPL was not yet compatible with the GPL. Now that the EUPLv1.1 and the GPL are compatible, the organisation could publish an updated version of Osha3 under that licence, EU-OSHA writes in a annual review.
As far as Moral knows, the code for the EU-OSHA web site has not yet been used by others, but he knows of several European agencies that are building their sites using Plone and Zope.
"Open source is everywhere", says Moral. Staff at the organisation for instance use several open source applications. "Most popular is web browser Firefox, but we use others, like database management system Postgresql, multimedia player VLC, file management tool Filezilla and webserver Apache."
EU-OSHA runs Osha3 on a server running the Debian GNU/Linux distribution. "It should run on any popular Unix environment, it has for instance been reported to run also on the Ubuntu GNU/Linux distribution and Apple Mac OS X", the institute writes on its web site. However, it warns, users might encounter issues with external dependencies. Running the installation requires other open source tools, including OpenLDAP, PostgreSQL, MySQL and Lxml.
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