Are there political dimensions to open source software and hardware? Americans might be surprised to see such a question, given Washington’s almost complete indifference to the dramatic rise of these approaches to technology development. But that’s not the case in many other parts of the world, and particularly in Europe, where the European Commission (EC) and the governments of many constituent nations have taken great interest in not only promoting the uptake of open software, and, more recently hardware, but incorporating open source software and hardware into procurement decisions and inter-country communication platforms and protocols.
This process continues, and you can have an impact on future decision making by participating in a survey commissioned by the EC to guide its future open source policy development.
The survey questionnaire is targeted at developers and users of open source, takes about fifteen minutes to complete, and can be found here. Input from non-Europeans as well as Europeans is welcome and requested…