The EU Open Source Software Solutions Catalogue (EU OSS Catalogue) has been created by the FOSSEPS Preparatory initiative, Free and Open Source Software for European Public Services, which aims to promote cooperation at European Union level by giving visibility and facilitating the sharing and reuse of Open Source Solutions developed “by and for” public sector bodies in the European Union Member States.
This catalogue is based on a federated architecture of public APIs that generates a central pool of OSS Solutions collected by OSS Solutions Catalogues from EU Member States, at both National and Local level.
EU OSS Solutions Catalogue Federation Requirements
The Federation and integration of a National/Local Catalogue into the EU OSS Catalogue are made possible by the following architectural conditions and technical constraints:
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Each National / Local OSS Catalogue should be a collection of OSS Solutions developed “by and for” public sector bodies and stored in public GIT repositories;
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Each OSS public GIT repository should implement the publiccode.yml metadata standard: this ensures that each OSS Solution has its specific qualification in the context of Public Services (more info on this below);
- Each National / Local OSS Catalogue should provide a publicly accessible API that can provide the list of its OSS public GIT URLs: this condition allows the EU OSS Catalogue to federate (fetch and continuous synchronise) from original sources catalogs;
Publiccode.yml standard adoption
The EU OSS Catalogue adopts the publiccode.yml standard as its reference data model and qualifier for discovering / filtering OSS Solutions in the EU Public Sector.
Publiccode.yml is a metadata standard designed to document and describe public sector software to help promote sharing and reuse. It uses a YAML file format to provide structured information about the solution’s features and characteristics (with both mandatory and optional information).
Solutions that include publiccode.yml files in the root of their own public GIT repository, improve their interoperability and discoverability around Europe and Worldwide.
EU OSS Catalogue Federation State
At the moment the EU OSS catalogue contains software from the following EU National & Local Catalogs:
| Catalogue | Type | Country | Description | Weblinks |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Awesome CodeGouvFr | National | France | CodeGouvFr, the French National Catalogue with mission to use and contribute to free software and digital commons provides. Awesome Open Source projects actively maintained and funded by Public Administrations and Public Sector organizations. |
https://code.gouv.fr/sources/#/awesome |
| Code Europa EU | European | Code development platform for Open Source projects shared by the institutions of the European Union, for which EU institutions, bodies, offices and agencies hold the intellectual property rights. |
https://code.europa.eu | |
| Developer Overheid | National | Netherlands | Developer Overheid is the Dutch National Catalogue, one central location for OSS Solutions developed by and for Dutch government organizations. |
https://developer.overheid.nl |
| Developers Italia | National | Italy | Developers Italia is a community of developers who design and code Italian digital public services, and provide the Italian National Catalogue for the acquisition and reuse of software by and for the Public Administration, as envisaged and required by national legislation. |
https://developers.italia.it/en/software |
| Open CoDE | National | Germany | Open CoDE is the German National Catalogue, an official, certified and secure central platform for providing direct access to validated open-source-solutions successfully used in other Public Administrations. |
https://opencode.de/en/software |
EU OSS Catalogue Federation Roadmap
The EU OSS Catalogue Roadmap a the moment include the following tasks:
- Identify and implement improvements to onboard and sustain additional EU Member State catalogues;
- Identify additional EU Public Sector catalogues that could be integrated into it;
- Promote the catalogue across the EU Member States to foster the sharing and reuse of open source solutions developed by and for public administrations;