The Open Source Observatory and Repository (OSOR) is a website launched by the European Commission under the IDABC programme, to support the distribution and reuse of software developed by or for public sector administrations across Europe, connecting EU services and Member States.
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The OSOR.eu platform, and in particular the OSOR.eu Repository and the OSOR.eu Forge are aimed to support and encourage the re-use of publicly-financed Open Source Software developments (OSS or FLOSS for "Free, Libre & Open Source Software") that are of particular use for public administrations in Europe. OSOR.eu aims to support the collaborative development of OSS applications and solutions, in particular cross-border collaboration and exchange of knowledge or software. Project owners are invited to open projects on the OSOR.eu platform and to license their content or source code under a recognised Open Source license, giving to a larger public the possibility to test and use their solutions, to provide their feedback and to contribute to quality. Re-use and collaboration should produce positive outcomes regarding the number of users, interoperability, sustainability due to the size and the motivation of the supporting developer’s community. OSOR.eu will also promote and link to the work of national repositories so as to encourage the emergence of pan-European federation of Open Source Software repositories.
The following services are available on the OSOR.eu site:
The OSOR project is financed by the European Commission, managed by the IDABC unit (DG Digit), and supported by the Member States national, regional and local administrations. As from September 2006 (kick-off) the delivery of the project is managed by a consortium led by UNISYS (Belgium), including also the United Nations University MERIT (Netherlands), the URJC University Rey Juan Carlos (Spain) and Gopa-Cartermill (Belgium).