Chapter 11. Libre Software in Europe

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.

^[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.

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.