Germany and France Team Up For An Open Source Project

Open source is the philosophy of production and design that promotes a product’s design or blueprint under a fair licence. While many organisations think that open-source policies are bad for the IT industry because of property rights, several technological firms in France and Germany think otherwise. In the most recent and biggest development in the computer industry, groups of two of the world’s most high-tech countries agreed to work on a wide-ranging project that will bring together several open-source organisations in Europe. The companies that pioneered this cooperation are Germany’s Open Source Business Alliance (OSBA) and France’s Conseil National du Logiciel Libre (CNLL). OSBA is a confederation of German open-source providers and users while CNLL works as France’s main agency in ICT solutions in the realm of open-source software development. H-Online reported that the two companies will collaborate to make their agendas and projects more accessible to neighbouring countries, and develop IT policy demands based on their respective codes.

OSBA and CNLL also call for more attention to the open-source industry and want open source software efforts to get more support from different government agencies. H-Online also said that both OSBA and CNLL want to put greater emphasis on interoperability based on open, royalty-free standards and freedom from patents.

France and Germany are two of the countries that recorded a significant increase in open source adoption. Forrester reported that the two members of the EU5 are now catching up in a high pace to USA and Canada. It said that in the coming years, „24% of German firms will extend their open source-based installations“ while „31% of French firms are expected to run pilot projects based on open source.“

Open source adoption is the trend in software development. Many companies succeeded because of this technological philosophy. By keeping their products open and free, they get global recognition. A good example here is PokerTH, an open source simulator that was launched in 2006 but has remained strong despite the presence of bigger online gaming companies such as partypoker. PokerTH, which is mostly used on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and GNU/Linux, is a Texas Hold’em simulator that has made waves in the open source community. Game developers who want to create online portals can easily do so by singing up and using PokerTH. Not only can you create web based sites, but you can also port the code into mobile applications for us within the Andriod OS.

Companies in Germany and France are lucky enough to have OSBA and CNLL. These two are the exact groups that the industry needs to expand open source adoption in Europe. They have the experience, tools, and the government’s backing to make a lot of companies and other institutions progress with using open-source software.