FDL organises 1st Free Software Developer Spotlight
FDL will tonight host its 1st Free Software Publisher Spotlight event presenting five different European software publisher solutions based on implementation success cases. The event is hosted in collaboration with the CNLL and will be held in the foyer of Cap Digital, Paris.
Paris, November 12th, 2019 - The FDL Libre Endowment Fund is set to organise the first "Free Software Publisher Spotlight" in collaboration with the CNLL and in partnership with Cap Digital. The event aims to raise awareness for European Free Software Publishers, their core competencies, their contribution to software technology and existing means to fund R&D of Free Software through available tax cuts and incentives. The inaugural event will take place today, November 12th, 2019 between 18:00-21:00 in the auditorium of Cap Digital in Paris. Each event introduces successes of five software publishers in order to underline their expertise in specific technological fields, their R&D investments or their ability to successfully deliver mission-critical applications for industry, government and academia.
A significant share - if not the majority - of Free Software is driven and developed within organised entities with paid employee: Free Software Publishers. Free Software Publishers can take different structures: corporation, foundation, etc. They share common characteristics: owning source code, defining software roadmap, taking legal responsibility and funding research & development. Free Software Publishers are often small entities driven by a small group of software authors, with or without the assistance of a community of punctual contributors. According to Brian Prentice (Gartner), communities are often non-existent in the case of enterprise applications, making the publisher indispensable to ensure long term sustainability. Most Free Software Publishers in the world are self-financed organisations located in Europe. Their technology portfolio is much wider than Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft (GAFAM). However, due to their philosophy of publishing free and transparent solutions geneally taking precedence over marketing and asset monetization, European Free Software Publishers remain largely unknown to decision-makers who are only aware of startups funded by venture capital with questionable profitability.
Jean-Paul Smets, president of the FDL Libre Endowment Fund: "The European eco-system of free software publishers is such a critical source of innovation, it is a shame it always seems to 'fly under the radar'. With this series of events the Libre Endowment Fund is trying to change this by putting Free Software Publishers and their success cases into the spotlight. Each participant will showcase one of their solutions and an implementation case. On behalf of the FDL, we will demonstrate the possibility of financing long-term maintenance as well as short-term feature development of essential Free Software useing the FDL and our sister association AWL - the Association for a Free Web."
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About FDL
FDL (Fonds de Dotation du Libre) is a french non-profit organisation to sponsor both the long term maintenance of essential free software as well as the short-term feature development - handled through it's sister association AWL (Association pour un Web Libre). Both associations aim to use tax breaks for donations made to general use and essential open source software to fill the gap between public R&D funding and private system integration funding.
More information: https://fdl-lef.org/