EU funded audits of Free Software – Pro-Linux

Society :: Politics / Law

The European Parliament has for next year funds for several Free Software projects granted. The funds open source programs are to be checked, which are used by the European Parliament and the European Commission

EU

European Union

When the deputies decided the EU budget for the coming year on 17 December, they agreed on providing one million euros to check free software vulnerabilities. The plan is more used by the EU authorities open source applications to undergo an audit. Vulnerabilities identified to be corrected in the context equal.

The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) welcomes the decision of the parliament. In a press release, FSFE’s President Karsten Gerloff said the following: “This decision is very welcome. Like most public bodies are also the European institutions for their daily operations highly depend on free software. It’s good to see that Parliament and the Commission at least invest a little in order to improve the quality of the programs they use. “

is the General for Informatics of the European Commission responsible for the implementation of a model proposal be that of the parliamentarians Julia Reda (Pirate Party) and Max Andersson (Green) was introduced. FSFE urges the Commission to work more closely with the responsible developers. The European Commission will publish the results of their audits as quickly as possible and bring all the improvements made in the upstream projects.

The budget also funds in the amount of 500,000 euros in addition to the funds earmarked for the audits to which the EU would like to start other software projects. One is used to encrypt the communication of the EU institutions. Furthermore, a system based on free software and open standards pilot project is planned to improve in 2013 published under an open source license AT4AM software. AT4AM use the parliamentarians to draft legislative drafts. The new project is to assist civil society actors to participate in the legislative process. In addition, a project is not intended to be made publicly available by default with the unclassified documents.