@Roberto My main purpose is to help the dissemination process of both promising and interesting EU funded open source projects.

Take QualOSS, the first I coveredR over this scrutiny phase: the project’s page had no page-rank until the day I blogged about it. Now it has been calculated and people googling around will get a chance to find it.

Commercial exploitation of open source research results is definitely a better target for my blog than anything else, maybe someone else might look into the closed-source stuff.

But let me offer another suggestion: spending time scrutinizing the Open Source related EU projects to see if they have been conducted efficiently is surely interesting;
but it would be much more interesting to scrutinize EU-funded projects that produce *non-open source technolgy*: indeed, while badly managed open-source related projects may still give back EU citizens something for their money (the code), we can be sure that badly managed EU-funded projects producing closed source artefacts are just money thrown out of the window.

And while funding open-source related projects on public money can be justified simply on the basis of increasing the scientific commons, funding closed-source projects on public money can be justified only if some significant, tangible positive impact on the society can be achieved as a result; said in another way, the standards for scrutinizing publicly funded closed-source projects should be much higher.

you should ask Roberto Di Cosmo about the EDOS and MANCOOSI projects.

http://www.edos-project.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/WebHome

http://www.mancoosi.org/

Cheers,

S. Fermigier

My intention is definitely not to be against the EU. I rather want to put under the spot light projects that deserve attention, and I hope that many of them are worthy to look at. Nevertheless some of them could be promising on paper and pathetic in practice, but we aim to the truth, only the (open source) truth!

maybe in an open source world of blogs we could catch up, but not for long …
and then there is the issue why this preference would be an issue. if open source is prefered, at least people get what they payed for, no?

a year ago in berlin i sat in the audience of a government sponsored meeting with lots of talk about open source and plenty of people from universities in the audience. i asked them “shouldnt the stuff you produce be available to those who pay for it?” the answer was a definite “yes, of course, but …”.

I for one like this imbalance towards open access to what i payed for!

Any other idea?

Update: On second thought, maybe asking projects’ owners to share projects’ Description of Work would be a first step in the right direction. Correspondences between the “expected” and the “actual” deliverables should come as the next step.