Jesus M. Gonzalez-BarahonaGregorio Robles
The libre (free, open source) software[1] community is probably one of the more global and internationalized. Therefore, it may be a little artificial to try to separate the European share of it in the hope of finding peculiar characteristics. But at the same time, Europe is so diverse, so full of national, cultural, and linguistic boundaries, that it may be difficult to find common patterns in this already diverse libre software world. However, our feeling is that in between these two facts, there is plenty of room for writing about what is happening in the European libre software scene. While preparing the material for this chapter, we have come to the idea that, in fact, this is not such a global world, nor does its European fraction lack common patterns despite its diversity. With this focus in mind, we have looked for both the peculiarities and the commonalities. We have walked through the enormous amount of data concerning what is happening in the vibrant European libre software scene with the aim of offering the reader the more relevant and revealing trends and facts, providing a vision of a complex and diverse, but also uniform, landscape. And, for sure, a very personal one.
In fact, although libre software can be considered to come from the U.S., the spread of the Internet (and before that, the Usenet) in Europe made it possible to develop a fragmented European libre software community as early as the late 1980s. With time, common trends that could be called "European" seem to be emerging from this framentation. However, even without strong pan-European relationships, and maybe due to the common sociocultural background, some trends are found now and again in different parts of the continent, producing a collage with many common patterns.
In this chapter, we provide some snapshots of that collage. Instead of focusing only on issues that can be truly called European (because they involve participants from many areas of the continent), we have tried to show the diversity of initiatives and environments, so the reader can have at least an idea of the details of a very complex landscape. We have also devoted some efforts to identifying common patterns and Europe-wide initiatives, especially when we find they are a signal of an emerging common trend. Intentionally, many examples which are European by nature or birth, but have evolved into global projects, are not included, or are mentioned briefly, since they are now more global than European and therefore make little sense here. There is, however, a clear intent to show the main European contributions to the libre software world, in terms of development, use, and promotion.
All in all, the set of case examples, and the issues presented on these pages, are just a (hopefully representative) showcase of what is happening in the European world of libre software, obviously filtered by our personal biases and backgrounds. For sure, the selection by any other observer of libre software in Europe would be different. We just hope that the reader will find our selection illustrative enough.
Before showing the current landscape of libre software in Europe, it seems necessary to provide some historical background. From issues like the European involvement and impetus in projects such as Linux (the kernel) or the KDE project, which influenced greatly the shape of the currently available libre software, to very specific use cases in European companies, which are mainly a consequence of the global importance of the phenomenon, there is a whole rainbow of milestones which will contribute to the understanding of the present situation.
The evolution of libre software in Europe during the early days was parallel (as it was in other parts of the world) to the penetration of the Internet (and before it, the Usenet). Therefore, it is not strange that areas which had an early and deep exposure to these Nets—such as the Nordic countries, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom—also had the first cases of involvement in global libre software activities. However, it is important to also consider some linguistic issues. For instance, those countries where the English language (which is clearly the lingua franca in the global libre software community) has more penetration (either as the mother tongue or the second language) commonly had an earlier involvement in libre software. With the passage of time, maybe since the mid-1990s, specific dynamics started to show strength in other regions, with more or less of a relationship to the global evolution. Most European countries (Germany, France, and Spain are clear examples) have grown their own communities and libre software fabric in partial isolation, to the point that many initiatives that are very well known in one country are almost unknown in the others and outside Europe, despite their valuable contributions. In many cases, the flux of information among Europeans of different areas is still carried through global (or, for that matter, American) events and initiatives. Just as a case example, we still find out about relevant news in other European countries through the American web news service, Slashdot, despite being reasonably well linked to the libre software communities in several European countries.
Considering this situation, the contributions of Europe to the history of libre software are extensive. We can consider, for example, events such as the birth of many applications and projects (consider Linux, the kernel, by Linus Torvalds, Finnish; Python, by Guido van Rossum, Dutch; MySQL, by Michael [Monty] Widenius, Swedish; PHP, by Rasmus Lerdorf, Danish; KDE, by Matthias Ettrich, German; and many more); or the foundation and development of some of the first companies with a business model based on developing or distributing libre software (such as MySQL AB, Trolltech, or SuSE); some of the first studies and initiatives denoting attention by public administrations to the libre software phenomenon (such as those by the European Commission); and some of the first research projects considering libre software as a matter of study (such as those performed by the FLOSS project).
Most of those contributions will be mentioned and presented in some detail within this chapter. Instead of following a timeline approach, we have preferred to group matters according to the different topics involved, each one in its own section: developers, community, companies, public administrations, legal initiatives, licenses, education, and research. Of course, this implies a certain degree of artificial delimiter, since many issues in fact belong to more than one of those sections. But we hope that what is lost with respect to that precision is gained in readability and comprehension of the situation as a whole.
[1] In this chapter, we will use the term libre software to refer both to free software (according to the Free Software Foundation definition) and open source software (according to the Open Source Initiative), except where making distinctions makes sense. Libre is a term well understood in romance languages, such as Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Italian, and is understandable for speakers of many others. It lacks the ambiguity of "free" in English ("libre" means only "free" as in "free speech") and is used by some people especially in Europe (although the term is rooted in the early U.S. free software community; see http://sinetgy.org/jgb/articulos/libre-software-origin/libre-software-origin.html for details). In this respect, it is important to notice that although the communities, the motivations, and the rationales behind "free" and "open source" are different, the software to which they refer is basically (although not exactly) the same.