Complementary to Joinup, which distributes information related to multiple software, semantic and data sharing projects from a wide variety of private and public project managers, code.europa.eu is the code development platform for open source projects shared by the institutions of the European Union (Commission, Parliament, Council, Court of Justice...).

code.europa.eu was created following Commission Decision of 8 December 2021 on the open source licensing and reuse of Commission software 2021/C 495 I/01, which you can read here. It is one of the outcomes of the Commission Open Source Software Strategy C (2020) 7149 final. You can find the strategy and more information about open source at the Commission here.

The Director General for Informatics, Veronica Gaffey, announced the launch of the open source depot two weeks ago at a conference of the think tank Open Forum Europe and the Czech Council Presidency. The platform will facilitate the joint development, exchange and reuse of solutions for European public services.

In order to eliminate red tape that prevented from sharing open source, the principle is that all project managers in the EU services who want to share free software with others are free to do that, according to the Commission Decision of 8 December 2021 on the open source licensing and reuse of Commission software 2021/C 495 I/01, which you can read here..

For this purpose the platform has published Guidelines on Commission software distribution and provided three contact points for any specific issue, which are:

• Central Intellectual Property (IP) Service: EC-IPR@ec.europa.eu
• Open Source Programme Office: DIGIT-OSPO@ec.europa.eu
• EC DIGIT Security Assurance Sector: EC-DIGIT-SECURITY-ASSURANCE@ec.europa.eu