The European Commission has launched the EU Open Source Solutions Catalogue. Through this central database, government services across Europe can find, reuse, and share open source software.
The European Commission is launching the EU Open Source Solutions Catalogue. The EU OSS Catalogue has been developed under the FOSSEPS initiative and fits within the Interoperable Europe plan. This acronym stands for Free and Open Source Software for European Public Services. The catalog currently contains more than 640 software solutions.
It includes both complete applications and reusable components that governments can use to build their own software. By the end of 2025, the Commission aims to add hundreds of additional repositories.
Wide Range of Offerings
The catalog is aimed at public administrations within the EU and covers more than 30 domains, ranging from digital services to data management. It is built according to a federated model that uses public APIs to bring together solutions from national and local open source catalogs.
The first integrated catalogs come from sources including France (Awesome CodeGouvFr), the Netherlands (Developer Overheid), Italy (Developers Italia), Germany (Open CoDE), and from European institutions themselves (Code Europa EU). More catalogs will be added later this year. The Belgian government is also considering software reuse. In particular, Smals is strongly committed to this.
Users can search by text, software origin, application area, target audience, and project maturity. This allows government agencies to quickly determine which solutions are immediately deployable and which are still in development.
Selection Criteria
The projects in the catalog are selected based on relevance, popularity, community support, active development, license, and adherence to open source principles. Those wishing to have a project included in the EU OSS Catalogue are encouraged to first offer it through an existing national or local catalog.
With this initiative, the European Commission aims to stimulate the use of open source software in the public sector and strengthen cooperation between member states. Reuse of open components by public institutions also ensures a more efficient use of resources.