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Comment by th0br0 | Hacker News Reader

I primarily know about the projects listed at https://www.fokus.fraunhofer.de/809f10db25eddf3e/projects A personal observation is that, nowadays, gitlab seems to be preferred to github as part of a push to rely more on software developed inside the EU (guess it's an aftermath of the whole NSA story).

PolicyCompass, for example, lives at https://github.com/policycompass

Carneades lives at http://github.com/carneades

MARKOS is up on SF http://markosproject.sourceforge.net/

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GitLab CEO here, we indeed see more and more organizations starting to host their own GitLab server to become self reliant.

This has to be taken with a grain of salt. Frauenhofer in particular is rather "patent focused" and I think it carries over to their (there's a lot of Frauenhofers...overgeneralizing) general view on software. It's only anecdotal evidence from being at some research matchmaking events (Horizon 2020 etc.) and working in that field.

That being said OpenSource is explicitly mentioned in many calls. I'm mostly working on country specific calls but they are usually constructed similarly. OpenSource is often mentioned as a "potential use after the project" or a "result". Interestingly the provided headlines for calls will often read like this: "Potential use (for example OpenSource, patents, marketable product)" :D

+Actual software development usually isn't the goal of research projects. In the EU they use maturity levels (initially from the aviation industry I think) and it's quite a bit more "actual software/solutions" focused than the country specific calls (by design). Overall anyone who has worked in software development or even better at a startup would get a good chuckle out of these research funding events and the general process btw. (my personal opinion).

Just curious, is that software developed by consultants or by actual EU employees?

FP7 founds research projects, so we're mostly talking about research software which is usually developed by researchers.

Consultants essentially. There's also some IT development going on by actual EU employees, but the projects I listed above are usually won through tenders often submitted as a joint project by multiple companies/organisations (research partners - i.e. universities -, development partners - i.e. big companies - + public partners - often for demo purposes) although the EU also funds some purely research oriented projects of course.

Thanks for the answer.

I met a couple of developers employed and contracted by the EU / Parliament, I really don't want to generalise this but they did not seem the type that would work on such software that you linked to...or the type that would actually recommend OpenBSD..or even actually know what OpenBSD is.

Never heard of them. Neglected PR?

Those 3 I linked above are mostly research projects, all funded as part of FP7 and the EU doesn't seem to do much PR for those themselves.

I'd expect the upcoming (pan)"European Open Data Portal" to receive significantly more PR from the EU.

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