Last month, CERN held a series of lectures on the topic of open source , and has now published recordings of them online. The five lectures took various perspectives of open source related to open science, intellectual property, research, and economy. While CERN has had a long-lasting involvement in open source and free software, this new series of lectures portrays the current open source and open science problems. Among other subjects, the lectures discussed legal aspects and licence compliance of open source solutions. The series also presented the result of the European Commission’s study on the impact of Open Source Software and Hardware on technological independence, competitiveness and innovation in the EU economy.
The history of CERN and open source is one of the best examples of how the involvement of public institutions in information systems development can impact and benefit citizens. With the creation and sharing of the World Wide Web in the public domain, CERN already paved the way for the sharing of information and source code today.
Nowadays, CERN uses open-source software extensively. CERN is now working to share its open-source culture with other research communities, in particular in the fields of life sciences, materials science, and computational science. The organisation also leads various open source projects such as Indico and Invenio.
Indico is an open-source platform created by CERN in 2004. The platform is used by over 200 organisations, including 11 UN agencies, to organise conferences, book meeting rooms and archive presentations. It originated from a European project that was a joint effort between CERN, and several universities. The primary objective was to create a web-based, multiplatform event storage and management system for scientific conferences and workshops. CERN took over the core modules developed internally after the project ended and created the software platform to cater to its needs.
Indico began as an Open Source project under the GPL version 2 and later version 3, with its entire code available online through GitHub. Indico has since evolved into a more comprehensive event management solution, and its functionality has expanded to include a full-fledged Room Booking module.