Open Sources 2.0

Chapter 11. Libre Software in Europe

Jesus M. Gonzalez-BarahonaGregorio Robles

The libre (free, open source) software^[1] community is probably one of the more global and internationalized. Therefore, it may be a little artificial to try to separate the European share of it in the hope of finding peculiar characteristics. But at the same time, Europe is so diverse, so full of national, cultural, and linguistic boundaries, that it may be difficult to find common patterns in this already diverse libre software world. However, our feeling is that in between these two facts, there is plenty of room for writing about what is happening in the European libre software scene. While preparing the material for this chapter, we have come to the idea that, in fact, this is not such a global world, nor does its European fraction lack common patterns despite its diversity. With this focus in mind, we have looked for both the peculiarities and the commonalities. We have walked through the enormous amount of data concerning what is happening in the vibrant European libre software scene with the aim of offering the reader the more relevant and revealing trends and facts, providing a vision of a complex and diverse, but also uniform, landscape. And, for sure, a very personal one.

In fact, although libre software can be considered to come from the U.S., the spread of the Internet (and before that, the Usenet) in Europe made it possible to develop a fragmented European libre software community as early ...