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OSOR | Search widget | Friprog | Open source
Friprog, Norway's open source competence centre, will be the first organisation besides the Open Source Observatory and Repository (OSOR) itself to implement the OSOR search widget on its website.
The search widget allows visitors to search among over 1793 applications that are hosted on ten Forges - software development websites - and provided by national and regional public administrations in Austria, France, Italy and Spain, and the European Commission's open source software repository, the OSOR Forge.
The decision to include the OSOR search widget was made on 1 October 2009. Following a workshop organised by OSOR as part of the Open World Forum in Paris, Christer Gundersen, one of the IT administrators involved with Friprog, contacted his colleagues in Norway.
"We got it working in no time, but we are now testing it", says Gundersen. "That will take some more time, for we discovered a few small bugs that we want to address."
Gundersen sees the widget as an example of how public administrations in the EU can benefit from the work that has been done by OSOR and by other competence centres. "It is a small but useful service on our portals."
The competence centre will also include the search widget on its open source software development web site, Delingbazaren.
Translation service
The results given by the widget are based on automatic translations of the project descriptions. The translations are made by using the European Commission's machine translation service.
"The widget consists of ten lines of Javascript and some CSS code, so you can customise it all you want", consultant Marco Battistoni, involved in the development of the OSOR website, explained.
If open source projects want to increase their chances of getting discovered, Battistoni recommends that they make sure that the websites provide an adequate description of the project. "The widget searches through the descriptions of all the projects, and when a description is just a single line, it makes it hard to discover them."
He recommends that projects provide roughly the same systematic information. Such information would offer a general description, give a list of features, outline some of the plans for future development and show visitors how to get involved. "Ideally each project would provide one example of a public administration that has implemented the application."
He warns the projects to try to provide information that will be useful for decision makers. "Do not only provide technical details, but show how public servants are using this software to improve their services or how it can help their organisation."
Sourceforge
During the Open World Forum, the OSOR Forge developer also discussed cooperation with Sourceforge, a well known open source software development website, operated by a US company of the same name. Sourceforge's vice president Jeff Bates said that the site's new terms of service, published on 13 October 2009, refer to a list of acceptable open source licences. This list of licences certified by the Open Source Initiative includes the EUPL. Bates: "We decided to move away from explicitly listing licenses, because our lag time versus the update on the OSI site was causing some customer service issues."
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