European Commission Interested in Open Source

The European Commission has recently initiated various actions (or efforts) related to Free/Open Source software. One of these actions, from the Information Society Directorate General, is to create a working group on libre software, with the purpose of analyzing the free software phenomenon, creating a set of recommendations for the Community and drafting a paper to be presented to the Commission. The group includes both representatives from the Commission services and active players from the free software arena in various European Union countries. You can find the current issue paper and a discussion mailing list right here. The EC is the controlling body of the European Union (formerly the European Economic Community), so we are talking a pretty big interest here. (Note: all the above are links to English pages; the EC's main site has various language sets available)