Julia Reda and Max Andersson, two newly elected Members of the European Parliament (MEPs), want the Parliament to build links with well-known free software communities. Last Wednesday, the Greens/European Free Alliance MEPS submitted two proposals for so-called preliminary pilot projects or preparatory actions (PP-PAs), to be decided on by the European Parliament in September.

PP-PAs allow MEPS to formulate political priorities and introduce initiatives that, if successful, can evolve into EU programmes.

Their first PP-PA proposes to build an infrastructure to encourage free software developers to help discover and fix security issues in free software that is being used by the European institutions. The project should also aims to create best practices for mitigating security threats.

The second aims to boost the uptake of AT4AM, a software solution for authoring and managing amendments to parliamentary texts. It is developed by the European Parliament and made available as open source.

Social contract

The IT security concerns of public administrations and free software communities are aligned, says German MEP Julia Reda: "It makes a lot of sense for public administrations to utilise the expertise and experience of the free software communities", she says. "Our two proposals explore ways of doing this, by establishing software governance, code audits and best practices."

In their PP-PAs, the MEPs point to Debian as one of the possible communities of free software developers. "Public administrations should naturally be using and contributing to the commons", explains Swedish MEP Max Andersson. Apart from costs advantages and avoiding IT vendor lock-in, the MEP says he appreciates the values in the Debian social contract regarding not hiding problems: "This is similar to the principle that the Parliament shall carry out its activities as openly as possible", he says.

In May, the Green group commissioned a study on how the EP's principle relates to free software and open standards. The report is expected in September.

Full control

Reda recommends that public administrations do not rely on software that provides intelligence agencies with more access and influence than they have themselves. "Free software's freedoms guarantees that public administrations are in full control of their systems", says Reda. "Free software also allows public administrations to make their efforts available to the citizenry, a mutual benefit of great value to society."

More information:

PP-PA for the Governance and Quality of Software Code - auditing of Free and Open Source Software

PP-PA promoting the use of AT4AM in civil society throughout the EU

European Parliament to weigh open source pilots