When considering the adoption of open source software in public administrations, one of the questions that arises is the availability of existing solutions and how to find your way among them. While there are many efforts at different levels to categorise existing software solutions to facilitate their adoption, these approaches are generally structured as catalogues. As Ciarán O’Riordan from the OSOR Team discussed last month, these catalogues are facing various challenges that can potentially limit their effectiveness. Which leaves quite a few people looking for ideas for how best to work on this.
There, it can be interesting to look at how countries outside the EU have structured their own overview of open source. The Japanese OSS Bird’s-eye View is in this regard an interesting alternative. It presents a visual summary of the complex and diverse existing open source solutions to help OSS beginners.
The OSS Bird’s-eye View is the result of more than 10 years of mapping. Updated on an annual basis, it also shows the evolutions and trends in ICT and how open source evolved these past ten years. First published in the IT Magazine “IT Leaders”, it was then maintained by the Japan OSS Promotion Forum, an organisation founded following the establishment of the trilateral cooperation between Japan, China and Korea at the Northeast Asia OSS Promotion Forum. Each year, members of the working group led by Taishi Yonejima update this document, deleting any solutions where:
- The development is discontinued and reached an end.
- Community is not functioning (including site closure, development stagnation, etc.).
- The licence was changed, and it is no longer free / open source software.
- The software was merged with another OSS or forked.
Sorted into fields and sub-categories, the graphic can be read at a glance and aims to help with picking a solution fit to one’s needs. Overall, what is striking about this project is the continuity and stability it provides. Maintained and discussed for years, it has allowed the Japan OSS Promotion Forum to analyse which sectors emerged in the open source environment and the wider IT field. Aimed at both public and private users, these kinds of efforts—led by a governmentally created industry group—have helped increase trust in open source in Japan. This document has been used by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry when publishing their compilation of case studies on ensuring the security of OSS.
Since recently, the document is published on Github, with the hope of getting input to make it a better tool.
The OSOR Team would also like to thank Taishi Yonejima and the Japan OSS Promotion Forum for kindly translating the document to English for OSOR’s upcoming country report on Japan.