The EU’s new digital strategy advocates open source

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What’s interesting about the EU’s digital development can be summed up in a sentence on page 25: “Co-creation will be encouraged. Open-source solutions will be preferred...”.

The European Commission published its digital strategy on November 21.

In Sweden we apply the principle of public access to official documents, which means that everything received by, or produced by, public authorities and municipalities is public information, unless there is a justification for classifying it as confidential.

There is a growing number of voices arguing that this should also apply to source code. The benefits include:

Software produced by, or for, one public authority can be used by another.
- This means more efficient use of our public funds. For example, all municipalities have the same mandate from the state with many recurring tasks in common. If the systems written to address these recurring tasks use open source, they can be much more easily reused and improved by other municipalities.
Greater opportunities for scrutiny and improvement.
- When systems procured with public funds use open source, residents, businesses, and the authorities themselves can help improve the systems and thus contribute to society.
Companies can use the open source developed by public authorities to make their services better for residents.
- A clear example is personal identity numbers (personnummer) and coordination numbers (samordningsnummer, a variant used for, e.g., newly arrived migrants). A person with a coordination number has no problem interacting with government agencies but may, for example, have difficulty shopping in an online store or getting a mobile subscription because coordination numbers do not follow the rule for personal identity numbers whereby the first six digits must represent a valid date.

Safespring advocates open source and encourages users to contribute their extensions to jointly develop and make things easier for others. By iterating on code together, systems improve faster, become more stable, and above all more cost-effective. The vision is a society where public authorities, companies, and private individuals work together to improve the code and the systems that are used.

EUROPEAN COMMISSION DIGITAL STRATEGY