Linus Sehn

Developing, using, and re-using Free Software is fun, but declaring licensing and copyright information is not. REUSE changes that. With three simple steps, it makes declaring licensing and copyright information unambiguous and perfectly human- and machine-readable, making life easier for everyone involved in the software supply chain. In this presentation, we will present the latest learnings from big projects that recently became REUSE-compliant. In addition, we will provide you with an update on the latest features of the REUSE CLI tool.

As software has gotten more complex over the last years, the importance of declaring licensing information has become even more crucial. The FSFE's REUSE initiative contributes to the goal of clearly displaying legal information in Free Software projects by embedding it into every file of the repository. Any project following the REUSE recommendations makes copyright and licensing information readable for both humans and machines. We ensure that individuals, organisations, and companies that are reusing code are aware of and respect the licence terms chosen by its original author, thus facilitating the communication of this legal information among everyone involved in the software supply chain.

REUSE integrates seamlessly into development processes and other best practices of indicating Free Software licences. In addition, there are tools and documentation to help you get started. During this talk, we will take you through the learnings of large projects becoming REUSE compliant (e.g. curl or GNUHealth) and present the latest features of our REUSE helper tool, which makes declaring license information a quick and fun endeavour.

TEDective is a free software (open-source) solution that makes European public procurement data explorable for non-experts. Let’s say you are a curious citizen who wants to find out how much taxpayer money your municipality spends each year on unfree software. To date, there is no free software-backed, community-developed application out there that helps you answer this question.

TEDective changes that by bringing light into the public procurement data published by the EU’s Tenders European Daily (TED) project. It transforms the XML files provided by TED into the interoperable Open Contracting Data Standard (OCDS) and then visualizes the data as a graph of relationships between companies and the public bodies they supply. Currently, neo4j is used to store the TEDective graph. Finally, the data will be enriched by other complementary data sources such as OpenCorporates and OpenSanctions.

Every year, public institutions in the EU spend more than €2 trillion on various goods and services. While the EU publishes a lot of data about public procurement in the form of TED (https://ted.europa.eu), somebody interested in European public procurement still faces a lot of difficulties: TED data is overly complex, doesn’t follow the international and interoperable Open Contracting Data Standard and is hard to explore as the UI provided by TED is limited to basic filtering and search.

This situation was the starting point for TEDective – an initiative by the Free Software Foundation Europe to make European public procurement data both accessible and explorable - for everybody. We believe that the transparency needed by such a solution to function in the interest of its users can only be provided by a community-led free software project. TEDective is such a project. The project already won the first prize at this year’s EU Datathon. With this initial funding, we are now keen to spread the word and build a community of data science, procurement and usability experts who can help us in our quest to open up and democratise European public procurement data.

In the talk, we will show you what we have done so far and how you can help us make TEDective more useful every day.