This is my draft reply for the inquiry of the European Union. While I’m symptathetic if people deem this kind of politics boring, these kind of politics inform laws and taxpayer budgets that in the end can make life for OpenStreetMap anything from very easy to very hard. We should at least attempt to routinely give some input, even if the Foundation has neither the will nor the means to run a ful scale lobbying operation.
I’m in particular grateful for suggestions where to prune or simplify the text to make it more impactful.
In a nutshell:
- We want to nudge the EU towards a European STF, as the STF impact on OpenStreetMap and elsewhere is highly positive
- We want to get people used to the idea that always a fraction of spending on The Hot Shit is towards The Boring Infrastructure that is silently but actually mission critical for the former
- The strength of open source (and OSM) is the credible long term maintainability, the real weakness the lack of long term funding
- The hidden strength of open source is that it draws in much more competent people
1. What are the strengths and weaknesses of the EU open-source sector? What are the main barriers that hamper
(i) adoption and maintenance of high-quality and secure open source; and (ii) sustainable contributions to
open-source communities?
Europe is and always has been highly connected both internally and to the rest of the world. This reinforces the benefits of Open Source and subsequently of the sector in Europe. Also, the social model of many educated people having available time beside their day jobs means that there is a broad latent pool of developers (notwithstanding that there are also many full time Open Source developers).
(i) For many areas of software there is a vendor lock-in in place. This is in particular true given that many people rather get educated rather to become users of incumbent software than to understand how software is made.
Secondly, many IT departments are substantially underfunded, along with the organisations they support, and expectations about appropriate salaries skewed. As a result, there is a risk that artifacts from underfunding are misperceived as shortcomings of newly introduced Open Source components.
It is understood that in some cases it may work the other way around. There are instances where the adoption of OpenStreetMap had a fast enough effect on cost savings or enabling work at all within the available budget because efficiency gains materalize fast enough. This usually happens where a rather competent staff can take advantage of a relatively simple software stack, but this is the exception.
(ii) Many projects have a general uncertaintly about their funding and have a rather short funding horizon. In the OpenStreetMap ecosystem, few projects have a secured funding beyond a year or so, and elsewhere it might be even shorter. This is even true despite it being used for infrastructure with decades of lifetime.
More sources of funding over a longer horizon of time will help developers to more clearly highlight longterm downstream use from otherwise more tentative applications.
2. What is the added value of open source for the public and private sectors? Please provide concrete examples,
including the factors (such as cost, risk, lock-in, security, innovation, among others) that are most important to
assess the added value.
Interoperability
The Metropolregion Ruhr has used OpenStreetMap data to create an end user map: it enabled them to use the accurate information what is on the ground independent of department friction or policy side-effects. The mission critical advantage is that OpenStreetMap is a neutral platform, opposed to many partial data sources that are incompatible to each other. Some transit agencies have modeled station data there or use POI information from there for again being an unhampered and comprehensive source.
For the same reason, some fire brigades and some government agencies have at time used OpenStreetMap data as a fairly neutral source to reality check outdated or incomplete data they got from responsible utility companies or other sources. We do not have a citable source for this.
The Deutsche Bahn has started to share the availability of their elevators in real time. This has in combination with OpenStreetMap data not only enabled access-free routing. It also attracted people to reflect about the data, to uncover patterns, and to build public trust in the infrastructure.
New Applications
Most bicycle navigation systems and virtually all pedestrian navigation systems are based on OpenStreetMap data.
While there is hardly a business model to collect and maintain the full grid of ways for bicycles and pedestrians, there is a strong interest from actual users of these ways to keep them mapped. As a result, the openness of the platform is mission critical to bring enough mappers to work on one coherent set of data and trust it to exist long-term.
Both navigation modes also profit from a lot of actual Open Source software development. The challenges to get directions for these modes of transit right a different from car navigation. The presence of a huge and accurate data set has been vital to supply the software development with samples what does exist and what does not.
All open source navigation systems are in heavy use in Europe, and many of them are maintained in Europe.
It is reasonable to believe that a substantial part of the modal shift from cars to bicycles is due to the availability of practial navigation tools. I.e. the open source stack has a positive environmental impact here.
Visibility and Enabling
The city of DĂĽsseldorf runs a huge fleet of gas lighting since more than a century. This has only been perceived as the actual valuable heritage that it is after activists have created a map of their positioning and shared that with the local newspapers. The project has only been in reach of few individuals because a stack of open source software around OpenStreetMap exists and the lamps have been recorded in OpenStreetMap.
I.e. there has been the real world effect of turning the gas lighting into actual heritage.
A less spectacular but even more impactful effect is that OpenStreetMap data is mission critial to geolocate photos. Geolocation tools like the ones of Bellingcat or Deutsche Welle rely on the possibility to have higly flexible search options on the geodata, which is only possible by an open source software stack operating on fully open data.
3. What concrete measures and actions may be taken at EU level to support the development and growth of the
EU open-source sector and contribute to the EU’s technological sovereignty and cybersecurity agenda?
The main challenge of Open Source is to have a sustainable business model amid the ever present opportunity to free-ride. The actual added value comes from the provided souvereignity, from attracting more competent people, and long term maintainability, in particular independent from the original vendor. None of this is usually visible already on a quarterly bottom line.
The EU shall ensure that tenders for public procurement are friedly towards Open Source. The longer the term of the procurement, the more important.
The strongest asset of Open Source is that the purchaser saves the right to copy and modify the code and let repair or rebuild the system or parts thereof at any later time by any company of the purchasers choosing, with no additional fee.
Procurement shall include such clauses.
A strong antipattern is if laws award to a company a de facto monopoly.
4. What technology areas should be prioritised and why?
Open Source shows its strengs towards long term support and towards making contributions easier for any competent party.
This results in a high benefit-effort-ratio in the context of infrastruture. The longer a system is supposed to exist, the more benefit comes from the fact that it can be maintained by a broad set of people.
In addition, more grounded systems with the simplest possible interfaces have lower barriers of entry. By a lower number of dependencies they also have a longer useful lifetime.
Typical examples of nearly universal usage are web servers and browsers, databases, in particular classical relational databases, operating systems and runtime envoirments on top of them. But also web projects that preserve the knowledge of the world (where OpenStreetMap does humbly see itself along WikiMedia and others).
By contrast, the technology of the day (AI, Cryptocurrency, Quantum Computing) is usually exploited by a whole flock of venture capital start-ups that are designed to attract and burn money and burn attention for that purpose as well. This is usually a poor use of taxpayer money, although it is understood that there is political momentum in each case.
The German STF has proven to pick a decent choice of infrastructure projects.
Thus a simple but very effective approach can be to
- create an STF on the full Europrean level in coordination with the German STF
- hand over one Euro to them for every ten Euro of investment made elsewhere for IT technology of the day, i.e. a fixed small ratio to emphasize the efficency advantage that thits approach has
5. In what sectors could an increased use of open source lead to increased competitiveness and cyber resilience?
Simply said, everyhwere. Almost no piece of software is simple enough to be proven harmless.
A hidden kill switch on defense equipment is an obvious risk, but a hidden kill switch on electrical equipment or many public service vehicles can be devastative, too. This goes all the way to social media where a bias in censoring or hiding content is an obvious device of manipulating public opinion.
The more grounded example of that only a common data format of open data made a map available to everybody from first responders to market authorities to simply an ecosystem of service providers has already been given.
Given, this will not likely lead to anything watching the nepotism in place.